cHand: Open Source Hand Posture Visualization in CHAI3D

Abstract

Visualization of hand movement is an important part of many medical training, VR and haptic experiences, which researchers typically address by developing application specific hand visualization tools. While some existing simulators allow for hand kinematic visualization using a generic hand model, they are usual targeted for robotic grasp planning rather than designed specifically for rendering in applications that include haptic experiences. To fill this gap, in this paper we present cHand, an extension of the haptics software library CHAI3D, that enables hand kinematic visualization of an arbitrary hand model. A representation of the hand can be achieved with elementary geometric shapes that are provided by CHAI3D, or with custom geometries loaded from STL files. We release cHand as an open source contribution to keep with the open source nature of CHAI3D, and present a tutorial on its use in this manuscript.