EDP+Report


 * PROJECT REPOPRT **
 * Prepared for: Dr. M. Kyan**


 * Prepared by: Kimiagar Ehsan**
 * Talayian Shayan**
 * Shafie Siamak**


 * Date: November 30, 2009**

** Development of a Slim Haptic Glove **
 * Using Shaped Memory Alloys, Infrared Tracking and Blender Game Engine **



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Abstract
Index Terms—Infrared, Tactile Feedback, Force feedback, haptics, virtual reality (VR).
 * H ** aptic gloves open up the world of force and tactile feedback by allowing the user to feel virtual objects in a natural way. In most of the existing gloves, a remote box houses a large number of actuators and sensors. Power to the glove is transmitted via cables. If haptic gloves were cheaper and more readily available in the market, they could become more common as human–machine interfaces. In this paper, a lightweight and low-cost haptic glove system is pioneered which is designed for virtual environments. In order to reduce the weight of the system, various innovative approaches such as utilizing Shape Memory Alloys for feedback and infrared for tracking were considered. Servo mechanism was also considered and partially developed.

Introduction
I magine shaking hands with someone thousands of kilometers away, virtually over the internet. Haptic Glove is a device that could potentially make this a reality. The "haptic" glove exerts a force on the wearer's hand to provide the sensation of touching a solid object or convey a tactile sense of the material's texture. Extending the frontier of visual computing, haptic interfaces have the potential to increase the quality of human-computer interaction by accommodating the sense of touch. Human hands and fingers are sensor rich, which allow us to stably pick up, stably grasp and manipulate objects. These actions require full sensitivity on fingertips as well as all along the finger segments, and on the palm. Most force feedback devices rely on electric motors, pneumatics, vibro-tactile simulators or some other conventional power producing method. However a number of new technologies being investigated for a wide variety of purposes, Local geometry sensing is being pursued with embedded strain gages, and fluid filled membranes. Memory alloys are also being investigated as possible mechanisms for creating tactile feedback. The primary challenge is to provide enough sensor information to the haptic glove to develop a robust algorithm for generating a proper sensation. Haptic technologies are already used effectively in a number of applications such as manipulation of nano-materials, molecular docking, surgical training, virtual prototyping, gaming and digital sculpting. It has also been shown that the ability to touch virtual objects increases the sense of presence in virtual environments by providing real-time sensorial interaction with the simulated environment.

Hand Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the Wiimote

 * I **n This experiment the infrared camera in the Wiimote was employed to track the location of the P5 glove with three degrees of freedom. Only two of the eight active LEDs of the P5 glove were used to render the view dependent image on the screen using a desktop VR . “This transforms the display, into a portal to a virtual environment.” The program needs to know the display size and the separation between the two IR LEDs. The software is a custom C# DirectX program and its algorithm, is explained in this section.

Hand/Head Tracking Algorithm
Variations of X and Y are computed (Equation 1), then Pythagorean theorem is used to find the distance between the two LEDs (Equation 2), this distance is, what is seen by the IR camera, and not the actual separation of the two LEDs.
 * P **resenting an effective algorithm for Tracking of Hand/Head with three degrees of freedom; calculations are based on radian per-pixel and the display size.