Using leap motion controller in virtual reality environments

Abstract

Virtual reality has been gaining a lot of attention lately, due to devices such as the Leap Motion Controller introduced to the market that allows users to interact with virtual objects in the virtual world. However, most of the virtual reality content is lean towards gaming and very little content is meant for serious application. Most of the hand gestures implemented to interact with virtual objects are rather unnatural, takes time and require some tutorials before users get used to them. The aim of this project is to propose gestures that are required to interact with virtual objects in virtual environments for precision assembly and modelling application in the most natural manner like in the real world. The proposed method was implemented in Unity3D 5.3 and Leap Motion Orion 3.1. The method allows the users to grab the objects fairly well and accurately provided that a Mesh Collider is used for collision detection on the hands. Visual cues and depth cues are very important to improve the success rate on attempts to grab the virtual objects.