A study on the naturalness of gesture-based interaction for children

Abstract

The emergence of new gesture-technologies that use bare-hands without any remote control or tools to hold is a good indicator that the technology is implementing naturalness in an input control system. However, the concept of naturalness that is commonly applied is interpreted from the adult user's perspective without realizing that the equally importance users of gesture-based technology are children. For this reason, this study was undertaken to describe the natural elements of gesture-based interaction in terms of how they influence the behavior of children using gesture-based technology devices, and to what extent the children benefit from their use. This includes the identification of issues and opportunities related to naturalness in using the latest gesture-based technologies, Kinect and iPad. Our observations show that the naturalness in gesture-control devices enabled children to reflect real world situations into the interaction, thus, aiding them to call back (recall and demonstrate) the gesture command easily and sparking positive feelings during the interaction. We conclude that understanding naturalness from a children's perspective can offer potential benefits to children in the utilization of gesture-based technologies. © 2013 Springer International Publishing.