Touchless interaction-novel chances and challenges

Abstract

Touchless or empty-handed gestural input has received considerable attention during the last years because of such benefits as removing the burden of physical contact with an interactive system and making the interaction pleasurable. What is often overlooked is that those special forms of touchless interaction which employ genuine gestures - defined as movements that have a meaning - are associated with the danger of suffering from the same drawbacks as command based interfaces do, which have been widely abandoned in favor of direct manipulation interfaces. Touchless direct manipulation, however, is about to reach maturity in certain application fields. In our paper we try to point out why and under which conditions this is going to happen, and how we are working to optimize the interfaces through user tests. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.