Principal Investigators

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Lars Linsen, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster (Homepage)
Dr. Dimitar Valkov, Saarland University (Homepage)

While interactive 3D environments have gained increasing popularity in the last years, 3D user interfaces still remain rather complex and in many cases require special skills and training. Investigations on reach-to-grasp actions in various domains of psychology have consistently shown that the natural kinematics of prehension allows for predicting the object a human is going to grab and sometimes even the subsequent actions that will be carried out with that object. These insights promise great opportunities for substantially improved interaction in 3D environments, provided that the hand kinematics information is extracted and evaluated on the fly and instantaneously incorporated in the interface.
In this project, we will establish a general framework for the analysis of prehensile behavior in the context of human-computer interaction and we will explore the applicability of prehensile information to design natural user interfaces for the interaction with computer-generated virtual environments.