Effectiveness of virtual hands in 3D learning material

Abstract

A virtual reality model for a motional electromotive force physics experiment, "Fleming's rail," was designed and developed. A hand gesture interface was constructed to control a virtual simulation using a Microsoft Kinect sensor and a finger-gesture interface SDK. A gesture-based object tracking test was performed to examine the effects of virtual hand visualization. In addition, motion trajectories of real hands with and without hand visualization were analyzed. Trajectories obtained with hand visualization exhibited higher Hurst exponent values compared with those obtained without virtual hand visualization. This suggests that the displacement change was more persistent with positive fluctuation feedback, indicating sensory feedback for real hand motions. For comparison, the effects of the model on learning Fleming's left- and right-hand rules were experimentally tested. Results exhibited that knowledge acquisition from the model was almost equivalent to that from the real experiment. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.