Analyzing mid-air hand gestures to confirm selections on displays

Abstract

The use of applications based on mid-air gestures has been increasing during last years, but there are still challenges to be addressed. One of them is the type of hand gestures that should be employed in specific scenarios and/or tasks. A particular case is the selection of an item on a display or surface, with the following confirmation of that selection. Thought several gestures have been proposed to confirm a selection, user interface designers should know the differences between them to make an appropriate decision. Therefore, we analyzed a set of confirmation hand gestures using performance metrics and subjective measures to make comparisons between the chosen gestures. According to our results, all the studied gestures can be perceived to be intuitive, but hover was the best gesture for confirming a selection. The reported findings should help designers to make distinctions between confirmation gestures and made decisions according to the desired scenarios.