Difference between Hand direction vs palm Normal - unity3d

What is the difference between Hand.Direction and Hand.PalmNormal?
in the documentation, both methods have mentioned that "The direction is expressed as a unit vector pointing in the same direction as the directed line from the palm position to the fingers." what is the exact direction of the palm? is palm normal the normal vector of the direction?

Hand.Direction vs Hand.PalmNormal
Hand.Direction is like if you took a pencil and bridged the distance from the middle of your palm towards your fingers. Hand.PalmNormal would be if you took a pencil and put the eraser end of it flat on your palm, ignoring anything the fingers are doing.
To see for yourself, there is a demo you can check out. Also, here is a graphical depiction:

Related

MLKit Pose Detection: How to measure angle when the skeleton turns sideways?

I am trying to measure angle between points shoulder, hip and ankle (to identify how much lift person's leg). When the person stands on front of the camera it works well but when the person turns sideways it fails. How can I handle it?

Fastest way to determine line of sight on a grid

I am improving a video game of mine where I currently have the problem that NPCs can shoot through walls. In order to fix this issue, I have decided to completely re-do my work regarding ground combat.
I use a tight grid for finding paths from any point A to B. I store my grid as an image-like structure and use Jump Point Search for the pathfinding itself. My goal is to find a location that is as far away from the enemy as possible (limited by the firearms's range) that also has a direct line of sight to the enemy.
In my latest approach, I determined all nodes in my grid that are within weapon range and that are connected to the enemy's location (colored in green in the image below). The final missing part is filtering these points so that only the points with a valid line of sight remain.
I can also detect the border lines (colored in blue) very fast. I could check for every node, if a line from this node to the enemy would intersect any border line. If that is not the case, I have clear line of sight. However, I assume this to be neither fast nor the optimal solution.
Do you have any ideas or suggestions? I am glad for any hint!
I visualized the grid in the following image to give you an idea of what I am talking about. If a character would stand in the lower right green area, he could not shoot the enemy in the upper left area because of missing line of sight.

Can the coordinate of any point that a person looks at be determined from the photo of his eyes?

I am planning to develop a program in MATLAB/Python that can detect the coordinate of any point in space that a person is looking at. I was hoping to do it by placing a headset with a camera installed before eyes and tracking the pupil of the both eyes. I still don't know if it is possible. That's why I need help.
This is a challenging task.
To some extent, you can determine the outline of the pupils, and a little of the iris, by image processing. Then fitting an ellipse to these and a little geometry from the ellipse axis gives you an approximate direction of gaze. Then drawing two rays from the eyes and following these directions will give you a point of convergence.
The coordinates you will obtain will be relative to the image plane, i.e. to the position of the camera, which will move with the head.
Anyway, exact outlining of ellipses will be inaccurate, the rays will fail to cross exactly, cornea refraction and perspective will alter the measurements, the glasses will move a little, and so on.

Unity3D angle between vectors/directions on specific axis

I have two directions and i am trying to calculate the angle on a specific axis. The object from which the directions are derived is not a static object so i'm struggling to get my head round the maths to work out what i need to do.
FYI, I have the start and end points that i have used to calculate the directions if they are needed.
Here's a diagram to show what i am looking for:
The above image is from a top-down view in unity and it shows the angle i want.
The problem can be seen from the above image, which is that the directions are not on the same height so i can't use the vector3.angle function as it won't give me the correct angle value.
In essence i want to know how much would i have to rotate the red line to the left (top view) so that it would line up with the blue (top-view).
The reason i need this is as i am trying to find a way of getting the side-to-side angles of fingers from my leap motion sensor.
This a generic version of my other question:
Leap Motion - Angle of proximal bone to metacarpal (side to side movement)
It will provide more specific information as to the problem if you need it and it has more specific screenshots.
**UPDATE:
After re-reading my question i can see it wasn't particularly clear so here i will hopefully make it clearer. I am trying to calculate the angle of a finger from the leap motion tracking data. Specifically the angle of the finger relative to the metacarpal bone (bone is back of hand). An easy way to demonstrate what i mean would be for you to move your index finger side-to-side (i.e. towards your thumb and then far away from your thumb).
I have put two diagrams below to hopefully illustrate this.
The blue line follows the metacarpal bone which your finger would line up with in a resting position. What i want to calculate is the angle between the blue and red lines (marked with a green line). I am unable to use Vector3.Angle as this value also takes into account the bending of the finger. I need someway of 'flattening' the finger direction out, thus essentially ignoring the bending and just looking at the side to side angle. The second diagram will hopefully show what i mean.
In this diagram:
The blue line represents the actual direction of the finger (taken from the proximal bone - knuckle to first joint)
The green line represents the metacarpal bone direction (the direction to compare to)
The red line represents what i would like to 'convert' the blue line to, whilst keeping it's side to side angle (as seen in the first hand diagram).
It is also worth mentioning that i can't just always look at the x and z axis as this hand will be moving at rotating.
I hope this helps clear things up and truly appreciate the help received thus far.
If I understand your problem correctly, you need to project your two vectors onto a plane. The vectors might not be in that plane currently (your "bent finger" problem) and thus you need to "project" them onto the plane (think of a tree casting a shadow onto the ground; the tree is the vector and the shadow is the projection onto the "plane" of the ground).
Luckily Unity3D provides a method for projection (though the math is not that hard). Vector3.ProjectOnPlane https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Vector3.ProjectOnPlane.html
Vector3 a = ...;
Vector3 b = ...;
Vector3 planeNormal = ...;
Vector3 projectionA = Vector3.ProjectOnPlane(a, planeNormal);
Vector3 projectionB = Vector3.ProjectOnPlane(b, planeNormal);
float angle = Vector3.Angle(projectionA, projectionB);
What is unclear in your problem description is what plane you need to project onto? The horizontal plane? If so planeNormal is simply the vertical. But if it is in reference to some other transform, you will need to define that first.

2D Game control question - rotation & movement

I was wondering if anyone could help me get started or pointed in the right direction. I'm looking to make a simple driving game using core animation. I'm a pretty good obj-c programmer, but when it comes to movement and math, I fail. I want a steering wheel to control the direction of the car, and a forward/backward to control acceleration & deceleration. If anyone can help me with the steering wheel code, I would be greatly appreciated! So basically I need help making a circle that can rotate with 1 finger drag, and i'll pass it's transform values to my car view ( i think i can handle the accel/deccel code) Any takers? :) Also, I have 2 invites for dribbble.com to give away, anyone who helps me, id be glad to give one out to.
grady, totowtwo, thanks for both your answers, I appreciate it. I;ve gotten to the point where I can rotate a "steering wheel" and it will rotate my "car", I also got it to move forwards and backwards. Just need to moving to be more realistic... Here is a link to the xCode project, http://www.cl.ly/7VBU, kept it very simple so if anyone looks at it - it will be easy to change / add code. So, if anyones wants to look at it,and help me make the movement more realistic, i'd be forever in your debt! :) thanks!
A starting point would be to recognize that a typical car steering wheel has 900 degrees of movement, whether you want that for the finger wheel or not is a design decision. The wheels in a car typically point about 30 degrees off +z at maximum rotation of the wheel. You could use a simple linear transformation from steering wheel angle to wheel angle.
From there, Car delta angle is a function of wheel angle times forward distance. As the car moves forward, you can imagine tracing the tangent of a circle with an infinite radius when you are pointing straight ahead, and a circle of smaller radius (~4x car length) when steering wheel is full tilt.
Of course, feel free to discard the design rules of typical vehicles. Give your users fun drive trains like holonomic robots have!
I am no expert but you could probably do something like:
CGPoint centerOfWheel;
CGPoint currentTouchPoint;
float radians = atan2(currentTouchPoint.x-centerOfWheel.x, currentTouchPoint.y-centerOfWheel.y);
then apply the transformation to the wheel ... of course you will want to make the transformations cumulative on the view over a distance, as continued turning of the wheel will result in continued turning.
also to make it feel more real, and less responsive you may want to use a lesser degree of turn, so that turning the wheel in once circle doesn't result in a whole circle turn of the vehicle. you will have to play around.