Building an Exoskeleton Glove on Virtual Reality Platform

Recent advancements in virtual reality (VR) technologies allow users to experience virtual environment in lifelike fidelity. But users still have a very limited level of interactivity with virtual objects in these virtual environments. Current generation input/output devices are not sophisticated enough to emulate physical interactivity between the user and the virtual environment. In this paper, the construction method of building a new type of input output (I/O) device, a VR glove, that allows users to physically interact with the constituent virtual objects in the virtual environment, is presented. The VR glove tracks the user's physical finger movement and translates the movement to virtual fingers in a game environment, and if the virtual finger touches a virtual object, the motors attached at finger joints of the VR gloves spin up or down to generate haptic feedback to emulate the physical interactivity with the virtual object. The prototype glove covers a single finger. To test the glove, two different test environments, where the virtual finger interacts with soft and hard virtual object, were built.