Virtual 3D sculpturing with a parametric hand surface

Many techniques have been developed for 3D object deformation. These techniques have been widely used in most CAD/CAM systems. Intuitive while efficient methods for interactive 3D object deformation in a VR environment, however are rare. One of our current research projects is to develop such a technique based on the use of a sensor glove. The idea is to create a hand surface interpolating through all the data points of the sensor glove. Through mapping the vertices of an object model to the hand surface, the object model may be deformed simply by changing the hand gesture. An initial method for implementing this idea was presented in our recent paper. In this paper, we discuss some of the limitations of the earlier method and present a refined method that over-comes most of the limitations. The resulting method is both efficient and intuitive as demonstrated by the results of our experiments.