Force-regulated Elastic Linear Objects Tracking for Virtual and Augmented Reality

Elastic rods are commonly seen in our daily life. Although humans are sensitive to the shape change of rods, it is not intuitive to estimate the external forces applied to generate the deformation. We propose a method to interactively track the elastic linear objects by using the Cosserat rod model to regulate the captured noisy points. We develop a framework based on particle filters to work with the physics-based model, turning the inverse physics problem into a forward simulation and search problem. We show that with the proposed method, we can simultaneously digitalize the shape as well as the external forces on real-world elastic rods. With these capabilities, we demonstrate virtual and augmented reality applications to facilitate the interaction with elastic linear objects. The tracking performance is also validated with experiments.