Designing for Effective Freehand Gestural Interaction

Abstract

Gestural interaction has been investigated as an interaction technique for many years and could potentially deliver more natural and intuitive methods for human computer interaction. As a novel input mode compared to traditional input devices such as keyboard and mouse, researchers have been applying gestural interaction in many dif- ferent domains. There are many different gestural interaction methods and systems which have been built for both research and mass production. However, most previous gesture user interfaces rely on hand held devices or the wearing of fiducial markers for gesture tracking. The freehand gestures, which are tracked by distance sensors with- out requiring users to hold or wear special devices, are not fully explored in previous research. Considering that freehand gestural interaction could be easier to use and deployed for ordinary users in every day life, further research should be conducted for designing effective freehand gestural interaction.In an effort to extend the knowledge and understanding of human factors and inter- action design issues relating to freehand gestural interaction, we first provided a review of related works, and analysed the characteristics, design space as well as the design challenges and opportunities of freehand gestural interaction. We then progressively investigated several aspects of freehand gestural interaction including option selection in 2D and 3D layout, object selection in densely populated environments and 3D navi- gation in public settings. Based on the interaction design, prototype development and user evaluations, we gave the results of user performance, behaviour and preference. We also compared our findings with previous research to extend the state of art. Further- more, we extended the discussions to a set of practical design suggestions for effective freehand gestural interaction design for different scenarios and interaction tasks. We concluded the directions for the future development of freehand gestural interaction technologies and methods in the end of the thesis.

Date of Award	1 Oct 2013
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Eamonn O'Neill (Supervisor)