Gesture Elicitation for Augmented Reality Environments

Abstract

The study of gesture elicitation in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) aims to improve the interaction with the computational environment, providing improved usability and a consequent increase in performance in executing their tasks. In environments using augmented reality, gestures are preferable over eye gaze, as, in the former, the user does not take the focus off the field of work. However, unnatural motions are more difficult to memorize, and their use puts any gains from using the technique at risk. Thus, it is necessary to elicit gestures to discover which incorporated movement appears naturally when the user is asked to send a specific command to the interface. This work aims to elicit natural gestures for an augmented reality environment. During the elicitation process, research subjects were presented with stimuli to which they should react by performing gestures that represent commands for the interface in an augmented reality environment, such as, for example, moving forward, backward and changing zoom (scale). As a result, 434 movements were found, with an average of 18 movements per person, where nine actions for the right hand and nine for the left hand were separated. In addition, the movements made by the participants were categorized into bi-manuals, those that were worked with both hands to carry out the interaction, uni-manual movements, which is when the participant used only one hand, and symmetrical bi-manual, when the participant performed a move with one hand that depended on the other hand to complete the interaction. After these analyzes of individual movements, an average of 3 movements considered natural for each interaction were obtained, in which the researchers chose the two most performed by each participant; each movement resulted from an analysis carried out considering the naturalness in which the gesture was performed and also the ease that the participant had to do so. The gesture chosen for each command was the one whose category had the highest number of natural occurrences, the one that had the most performed category by the participants.