Multifinger interaction between remote users in avatar-mediated telepresence

Abstract

In avatar-mediated telepresence, remote users find it difficult to engage and maintain contact, such as a handshake, with each other without a haptic device. We address the problem of adjusting an avatar's pose to promote multifinger contact interaction between remote users. To this end, we first construct a contact point database for nine types of contact interactions between hands through contact experiments with human subjects. We then develop an optimization-based framework to compute the avatar's pose that realizes the desired contact learned from the experiment while maintaining the naturalness of the hand pose. We show that our method improves the quality of hand interaction for the predefined set of social interactions.