Hand tracking is an important aspect of human-computer interaction and has a wide range of applications in extended reality devices. However, current hand motion capture methods suffer from various limitations. For instance, visual hand pose estimation is susceptible to self-occlusion and changes in lighting conditions, while IMU-based tracking gloves experience significant drift and are not resistant to external magnetic field interference. To address these issues, we propose a novel and low-cost hand-tracking glove that utilizes several MEMS-ultrasonic sensors attached to the fingers, to measure the distance matrix among the sensors. Our lightweight deep network then reconstructs the hand pose from the distance matrix. Our experimental results demonstrate that this approach is both accurate, size-agnostic, and robust to external interference. We also show the design logic for the sensor selection, sensor configurations, circuit diagram, as well as model architecture.

We propose a differentiable rendering algorithm for efficient novel view synthesis. By departing from volume-based representations in favor of a learned point representation, we improve on existing methods more than an order of magnitude in memory and runtime, both in training and inference. The method begins with a uniformly-sampled random point cloud and learns per-point position and view-dependent appearance, using a differentiable splat-based renderer to train the model to reproduce a set of input training images with the given pose. Our method is up to 300 × faster than NeRF in both training and inference, with only a marginal sacrifice in quality, while using less than 10 MB of memory for a static scene. For dynamic scenes, our method trains two orders of magnitude faster than STNeRF and renders at a near interactive rate, while maintaining high image quality and temporal coherence even without imposing any temporal-coherency regularizers.