Section: New Results

A Lightweight Augmented Virtuality System for Providing a Faithful and Spatially Manipulable Visual Hand Representation

Participants : Sabine Coquillart, Olivier Martin, Andreas Pusch.

We introduced the technical foundations of a system designed to embed a lightweight, faithful and spatially manipulable representation of the user's hand into an otherwise virtual world - Augmented Virtuality (AV). A highly intuitive control during pointing-like near space interaction can be provided to the user, as well as a very flexible means to experimenters, in a variety of contexts. Our approach essentially relies on stereoscopic video see-through Augmented Reality (AR) technology and a generic, extendible framework for managing 3-D visual hand displacements. Research from human-computer interaction, perception and motor control has contributed to the elaboration of our proposal which combines a) acting in co-location, b) avoiding occlusion violations by assuring a correct scene depth ordering and c) providing a convincing visual feedback of the user's hand. This system has already successfully been used in one case and further promising applications are studied [17] , [18] .