Kinematic data of grasping movements directed towards virtual and real objects

Kinematic data of grasping movements directed towards virtual and real objects was generated for the MINDA and CORTESMA CITEC Projects.
Eleven right handed subjects (age: 24-39 years, 4 women) participated in a series of three experiments. All subjects had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and had no known impairments related to arm or hand movement. All subjects gave written informed consent to be part of the study. The experiment was carried out according to the principles laid out in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki. Subjects performed all three experiments in the same order, starting with Experiment 1, directly followed by Experiment 2, and then Experiment 3.
The experiments were carried out at the Manual Intelligence Lab, making use of its sophisticated multimodal set-up for investigating manual interaction (Maycock et al., 2010). During the data collection, the subjects stood in front of a table (with dimensions 210 x 130 x 100 cm). Subjects wore an Immersion CyberGlove II wireless data glove (Immersion Corp., San Jose, CA; data acquisition rate: 100Hz; sensor resolution: <1°) on the right hand that allowed for the recording of whole hand kinematics (22 DOF). In front of the subject (at a distance of 40cm), a holding device for spherical objects (golf tee) was positioned on the table. A laptop computer screen was positioned behind the holding device. A small round bowl (10cm in diameter) located 40cm to the right of the holding device served as target for placing the objects. A 14 camera Vicon digital optical motion capture system (Vicon, Los Angeles, CA) mounted around the table was used to monitor the trajectories of the hand movements via three retro-reflective markers placed on the back of the data glove.