A Grasp on Reality: Understanding Grasping Patterns for Object Interaction in Real and Virtual Environments

Grasping is the most natural and primary interaction paradigm people perform for every-day manual tasks in reality. However, while grasping real objects in Real Environments (RE) has been highly explored in literature, there is a recent emerging trend to explore the complications and nuances of hand interaction including grasping in Virtual Environments (VE). While this is leading towards a richer body of work to understand users’ approach to grasping in VE, a direct comparison between grasping real objects in RE and grasping virtual representations of real objects in VE has not been explored before. To address this gap, we perform a user study (n=20) on 7 representative real objects and their virtual twins from the “Yale–Carnegie Mellon University–Berkeley Object and Model Set”. We report on 840 grasp instances collected during a grasp and translate task across RE and VE. We present initial results on the observed differences between RE and VE grasping across the different objects using the grasp type metric from real grasping studies. We explore the rationale for any observed differences between the RE and VE and present indicative trends for VE grasping. Finally, we propose methods and approaches for furthering work within VE grasping for improving the natural grasping interface