Deforming virtual objects with an instrumented glove

A virtual hand controlled with an instrumented glove is used for visualizing the interaction between the hand and a virtually deformable object. Using a sphere-tree representation, collision between the fingers and the object is detected. Contacts between the virtual hand and the object are used for establishing constraints for the evaluation of deformation based on the finite element technique. Experiments showed that the critical process for attaining interactive response is the inversion of the stiffness matrix in finite element analysis. By using a parallel processing technique for the matrix inversion process, interactive response is attained for objects with a mesh composed of 300 nodes.