Thesis Project Form

Grasping is one of the fundamental actions we perform to interact with objects in real environments, and it plays a fundamental role for interactive virtual reality (VR) systems in several application contexts. To ensure the effectiveness of such VR applications, we must understand whether the same grasping behaviors and strategies employed in the real world are adopted when interacting with objects in VR.

The main goal of this thesis is to analyze grasping behavior in immersive VR. As a starting point, an existing experimental setup developed for studying real grasping action will be replicated, to analyze similarities and differences. In this experiment, several properties of virtual objects will be considered (texture, visual appearance). Then, several grasping modalities (i.e. different devices and techniques) will be compared, always with respect to real-world counterparts.

1) To analyze the state of the art in the field of human grasping.
2) To replicate a real world psychophysics setup into immersive VR (technical tools: Unity 3D, physics engine, texture mapping)
3) To perform psychophysics experiments and to analyze data
4) To embed into the VR system different interaction devices (Leap Motion, VR gloves)