Is it possible to interactively control/manipulate objects in Blender Internal/Cycles to have more realistic physics simulations? I am working on a project which involves some physical interaction between different objects in a scene; Most of the physical interactions could come from manipulating objects in the scene while the physics is working. For instance, I want to make a scene in which there is a articulated hand that moves some objects as shown in this video. I haven't been able to find anything regarding controlling objects in an interactive manner in Blender Internal and Cycles with the physics being on indefinitely. By indefinitely, I mean I do not want to set a limit for the number of frames the physics simulation should run.

So I wonder is it possible to have interactive scenes to manipulate objects using the physics in Blender Internal or Cycles?

I emphasized on Blender Internal or Cycles because the quality of physics simulations is pretty important for this project. In addition, I don't mind the physics simulation time. However, although having interactive scenes is possible in Blender Game Engine but I've heard that the physics in Blender Game Engine is only meant to be used for real-time simulations and is not realistic. I wonder if that is true? If that is the case, is there any workaround to either make Blender Game Engine use the physics that are being used in Cycles/Internal? 

P.S. I've heard that Blender 2.8 can potentially resolve this issue as it is possible to have interactive scenes with high-quality physics in it. Can anyone confirm this?
You are confusing physics, rendering and interaction, which are three different worlds in a 3d package like blender. If you want interaction then you need to use any game engine like unreal, optimized to calculate simulations (based on assumptions) as well as additional interactions in real-time. 

However, with that benefit of having a real-time simulation, you obviously forfeit simulation quality and especially image quality. Notice that even in a game engine, the simulation of physics only means object interaction and is another thing as how all the meshes are calculated to a final image.