DigiGlo: Exploring the Palm as an Input and Display Mechanism through Digital Gloves

Abstract

The shape and function of the human hand are intimately linked to our interaction with the physical world and sets us apart from our evolutionary ancestors. In the digital age, our hands still represent our main form of interaction. We use our hands to operate keyboards, mice, trackpads, and game controllers. This modality, however, separates content display and interaction. In this paper, we present Digital Gloves (DigiGlo), a system designed to evaluate the benefits of a unified hand display and interaction system. We explore this symbiosis in the context of gaming where users control games using hand gestures while the content is displayed on their bare hand. Building on established learning principles, we explore different hand gestures and other specially tailored interactions, through three carefully designed activities and two user studies. From these we show that this is an idea that has the potential to bring more intuitive, enjoyable, and effective gaming and learning experiences, and offer recommendations regarding how to better design such systems.