Virtual Hand Laboratory: Project Milestones

First Year Milestones

1. Build prototype version of a Virtual Hand Laboratory (hardware and software) for use in later milestones.
   Responsible: Booth, Calvert, Dill, MacKenzie and Marteniuk
2. Develop camera control and supplementary visual cues for animation and playback of simulations, experimental data, and statistical analysis to aid in analysis and hypothesis generation for kinesiology research.
   Responsible: Forsey and MacKenzie
3. Add additional devices to the Virtual Hand Laboratory.
   Responsible: Booth, Calvert, Dill and Forsey
4. Augment the Virtual Hand Laboratory with full head-coupled and stereo display to enhance the sense of realism and measure the effectiveness of these techniques through comparative studies.
   Responsible: Booth and MacKenzie

Second Year Milestones

1. Calibrate the Virtual Hand Laboratory by replicating earlier studies involving size and location of objects to be grasped and extend experimental capability to study perturbations related to display artifacts; refine the Virtual Hand Laboratory based on this experience.
   Responsible: Booth, MacKenzie and Marteniuk
2. Develop a full-skinned hand model for realistic rendering and animation based on hierarchical B-splines and an anatomically correct hand skeleton.
   Responsible: Calvert and Forsey
3. Develop a vocabulary of hand gestures for use in specifying animation of the human body.
   Responsible: Calvert and Marteniuk
4. Conduct ease-of-use and ease-of-learning studies testing visual, aural and haptic feedback for both experts and novices using traditional and exotic input devices for building-block 3-D tasks.
   Responsible: Dill, Forsey and Marteniuk

Third Year Milestones

1. Examine levels of abstraction (skeleton, polygonal, fully-rendered, and the use of auxiliary codings such as colour or sound to provide information about stress/strain, percent of extension) to extend the visualization cues for the playback of hand movement.
   Responsible: Dill, Calvert and MacKenzie
2. Extend ease-of-use and ease-of-learning studies to 3-D surface design.
   Responsible: Dill and Forsey
3. Analyze gesture and movement of the hand and the whole body to deduce intent, predict actions and determine level of control.
   Responsible: Booth and Marteniuk