From: jpc@tauon.ph.unimelb.edu.au (John Costella)
Subject: Re: TECH: Realistic Hand Model driven by DataGlove
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 93 10:09:14 EST



> From: schilkk@prism.CS.ORST.EDU (rAT)
> 
>         Hey, Folks!  Just made me think of something that I thought of one 
> day
> while playing with my hands.  I had a computer interfacing class, and I was
> thinking of making a pseudo-DataGlove.  The kludge is this - for each finger
> (not the thumb...), you need only two curvature sensors, not three.  Mount
> them on the first and second knuckles (the knuckles between the hand and
> finger and the first bendy on the finger).  The bend of the last knuckle is
> approximately the bend on the second - play with it and see...
 
Yeah ... I played with my fingers and it works (makes sense because
there's only one `string' being pulled).

Uh oh ... problem is when you actually grab something real: you go
back to three degrees of freedom. Example: put your hand flat on a
table with the last joint of each finger hanging off the end. You can
then wiggle the last joint without wiggle the others to any
significant extent.

I suppose the importance of this depends on whether you *want* to grab
real objects in your application (or only virtual ones).

John

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John P. Costella              School of Physics, The University of Melbourne
jpc@tauon.ph.unimelb.edu.au         Tel: +61 3 543-7795, Fax: +61 3 347-4783
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