Smooth Hand Preshaping for Visually Realistic Grasping in Virtual Reality

In virtual reality, grasping interaction techniques that use controllers often lack a smooth transition between the neutral hand pose and the one that fits the topology of the grabbed object. This transition is referred to as preshaping. We explore the impact on embodiment and task speed of progressively and automatically adapting the fingers' closure of the hand when it gets close to an object by anticipating the user's intention. A comparison with existing methods suggests that this approach negatively impacts the sense of agency but does not impact task speed, body ownership, and interaction and finger movement realism.