Using Personalized Finger Gestures for Navigating Virtual Characters

In this paper, we present and evaluate a method to navigate a character into a virtual environment based on personalized finger gestures. The methodology that has been developed allows a user to generate his/her own finger gestures that are associated with the actions of a character. Specifically, in a pre-processing stage, the user wishes to perform specific gestures for specific actions of a character creating a dataset of gestures. During the runtime of the application, Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and template matching methods were used to compute the similarity of the input and examples of gestures. The system recognizes the input gesture of a user and generates the motion required to navigate a character into the virtual environment. To demonstrate the efficiency and possible use of such a character navigation method, a number of users participated in an evaluation process. The results of the evaluation process indicate the possible use of personalized finger gestures for navigating a character into a virtual environment.