Surface deformation using the sensor glove

Intuitive 3D surface control and deformation are crucial to CAD/CAM. To do this in a virtual environment, however, the technique must be very efficient. A common method for shape deformation is the free-form deformation (FFD) method, in which the complete object is deformed by deforming a 3D grid of the object. In this paper, we propose an intuitive method for surface deformation based on deforming a hand surface, which is basically a bicubic B-spline surface interpolating or approximating key data points of a sensor glove (i.e. finger joints and palm center of the user's hand). By setting up a corresponding mapping between the virtual object being deformed and the hand surface, the object can be deformed with the control of the sensor glove. As the user flexes his/her fingers, the object changes its shape accordingly. Such control can be local or global. For local deformation, we introduce a region filter function which imposes locality on the mapping/deformation. The new algorithm is made very efficient through incremental update. It is also intuitive as if the user were using his hand to deform the object directly. Experimental results show the potential of the new method.