Physical Hand - Virtual Hand
Physically present - Virtually present
A physical hand next to a virtual hand. Two elements in the physical and the virtual space that are highly interactive to make virtual presence realistic enough for the user to feel immersed in the virtual environment. A virtual hand is in fact (and in technological terms) an Inverse Kinematics (IK) avatar that "obeys" to our movements, like a puppet. A puppet (either physical or virtual) constitutes a representation our actions.
EXAMPLE I
This is a sample video of my experiments. This is a virtual hand that responds to our actions. A next step could be an artificial hand of a robot that would respond to the virtual hand movements. This, makes the triptych of physical - virtual - artificial hand and bridges the gap between virtual environments and artificial intelligence, inaugerating the field of Intelligent Virtual Environments. On the background, there is a red light, which is the glove tracker.
EXAMPLE II
This second experiment of mine is the "What are you trying do, to move the bathyscaph? Are you nuts?" project. Okay this is its informal name... I'll soon come up with a formal one.
We use a physically simulated virtual hand to move a car physically simulated with Open Dynamics Engine (ODE). Simulating physics in our virtual world appears always more than enough to immerse ourselves in our virtual world.
I also include two screenshots of this virtual world. The first is a rendered one and the second a world-builder's one. We see our virtual hand (a skeleton hand) , and a car-protorype. Both elements are physically simulated (density, roughness, bounce, slip etc).
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