Grasping Objects in Immersive Virtual Reality Environments: Challenges and Current Techniques

Abstract

In real-life, grasping is one of the fundamental and effective forms of interaction when manipulating objects. This holds true in the physical and virtual world; however, unlike the physical world, virtual reality (VR) is grasped in a complex formulation that includes graphics, physics, and perception. In virtual reality, the user’s immersion level depends on realistic haptic feedback and high-quality graphics, which are computationally demanding and hard to achieve in real-time. Current solutions fail to produce plausible visuals and haptic feedback when simulation grasping in VR with a variety of targeted object dynamics. In this paper, we review the existing techniques for grasping in VR and virtual environments and indicate the main challenges that grasping faces in the domains. We aim to explore and understand the complexity of handgrasping objects with different dynamics and inspire various ideas to improve and come up with potential solutions suitable for virtual reality applications.