Investigating how user avatar in touchless interfaces affects perceived cognitive load and two-handed interactions

In recent years, touchless-enabling technologies have been more and more adopted for providing public displays with gestural interactivity. This has led to the need for novel visual interfaces aimed at solving issues such as communicating interactivity to users, as well as supporting immediate usability and "natural" interactions. In this paper, we focus our investigation on a visual interface based only on the use of in-air direct manipulations. Our study aims at evaluating whether and how the presence of an Avatar that replays user's movements may decrease the perceived cognitive workload during interactions. Moreover, we conducted a brief evaluation of the relationship between the presence of the Avatar and the use of one or two hands during the interactions. To this end, we compared two versions of the same interface, differing only for the presence/absence of the user's Avatar. Our results showed that the Avatar contributes to lower the perceived cognitive workload during the interactions.