Hand gesture-based tangible interactions for manipulating virtual objects in a mixed reality environment

In the environment of mixed reality (MR) or augmented reality (AR), there have been several previous works dealing with user interfaces for manipulating and interacting with virtual objects aimed at improving immersive feeling and natural interaction. However, it is still considered that there must be much progress in supporting human behavior-like interactions for providing control efficiency and natural feeling in MR/AR environments. This paper proposes a tangible interaction method by combining the advantages of soft interactions such as hand gesture and MR and hard interactions such as vibro-tactile feedback. One of the main goals is to provide more natural interaction interfaces similar to the manipulation task in the real world by utilizing hand gesture-based tangible interactions. It also provides multimodal interfaces by adopting the vibro-tactile feedback and tangible interaction for the virtual object manipulation. Thus, it can make users get more immersive and natural feeling in the manipulation and interaction with virtual objects. Furthermore, it provides an alternative instruction guideline based on the analysis of the previous interaction while manipulating virtual objects, which makes it possible for the user to minimize manipulation errors during the interaction phase and the learning process, which guides the user to the right direction. We will show the effectiveness and advantage of the proposed approach by demonstrating several implementation results.