Optical-Mechanical Motion Capture System for Virtual Reality Applications

Actually, virtual reality is introduced in so many areas, such as medicine, automotive industry, robotics, entertainment, etc. A common interest of these areas is related with the user interaction, or with devices allowing users to interact with virtual reality. In this work we present the development of a prototype to capture the user’s fingers motion, obtaining the flexion angles of the fingers and representing them in a virtual assembly environment. The developed prototype is composed by a mechanical system which transmits the generated flexion movements of the medial and proximal phalanges. The movement is transmitted using a nylon cable, which is captured by the use of a webcam. The offset of the cable is measured, and this permits to obtain the angular variation of the generated flexion by the phalanges. The Lucas-Kanade algorithm is used to follow, in a high velocity, the cable displacement. Experimental results showed that angular resolution is very high and angular capture-rate is over 30fps. We present an implementation of our prototype in a virtual assembly environment.