Flex and Pinch: a Case Study of Whole Hand Input Design for Virtual Environment Interaction

We present a discussion of design issues involving whole hand input in virtual environments. In many cases, whole hand input devices limit the types of interaction that the user can perform in the virtual world due to the nature of the device. One possible approach to alleviate these limitations is to provide hybrid input devices which enable the user to combine information generated from two different whole hand input devices. In this paper, we describe our Pinch Glove like input device which is used as a tool to augment bend-sensing gloves for object manipulation and menu selection as well as a method to test and evaluate different hand postures and gestures that could not be developed with a single whole hand device.