Interaction methods for virtual reality applications

Even after several years of development, human machine interfaces applied in Virtual Reality (VR) environments are in many cases not very well adapted to the user and the task to be fulfilled, which often affects the success of VR applications. This observation is made by plenty of experts and it coincides with the experience we have gathered within the past years. On this basis we started to adapt and advance existing HMIs, aiming to improve the handling and to meet the special requirements of dedicated applications. Our first VR application was the cockpit development using virtual prototypes. For this exercise it is essential to ensure, that the deviation of the real human body from its virtual representation is within a defined margin. Another important feature for cockpit development is the provision of haptic feedback. Both requirements could not be satisfied using commercially available tools, so we needed to develop our own methods. In the beginning we concentrated our activities on a precise representation of the human body. For this purpose we designed easy-to-use calibration methods for the measurement of the tracking sensor positions at the human body. In addition we developed a new kinematic model, which was able to compensate for inaccuracies, which arise from differences between the virtual and the real skeleton. In order to provid