AirMouse: Finger gesture for 2D and 3D interaction

Abstract

This paper presents AirMouse, a new interaction technique based on finger gestures above the laptop's keyboard. At a reasonably low cost, the technique can replace the traditional methods for pointing in two or three dimensions. Moreover, the device-switching time is reduced and no additional surface than the one for the laptop is needed. In a 2D pointing evaluation, a vision-based implementation of the technique is compared with commonly used devices. The same implementation is also compared with the two most commonly used 3D pointing devices. The two user experiments show the benefits of the polyvalent technique: it is easy to learn, intuitive and efficient by providing good performance. In particular, our conducted experiment shows that performance with AirMouse is promising in comparison with a touchpad and with dedicated 3D pointing devices. It shows that AirMouse offers better performance as compared to FlowMouse, a previous solution using fingers above the keyboard. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.