Enabling consistent hand-based interaction in mixed reality by occlusions handling

A mixed reality environment, namely the space resulting from displaying virtual contents co-registered to the real space, represents an effective paradigm for applying the potential of virtual reality in the everyday life instead of having it confined within a computer screen. In this context, gesture-based interaction seems to be the most suited approach for human-machine interfacing. However, in order that interaction to be visually consistent, the tridimensional composition of the virtual objects onto the real background should be per-formed respecting the distance of each rendered pixel according to the user viewpoint. This paper describes a simple yet effective hand/finger-based interaction system and a virtual-to-real occlusion-handling approach, able to process in real time the stereoscopic video see-through stream to achieve pixel-wise z-order info, crucial to evaluating whether each rendered pixel should be displayed. The experiments confirm the efficacy of the proposed method in a simulation context.