A Study for Investigating Suitable Gesture Based Selection for Gestural User Interfaces

With gestural interfaces becoming increasingly popular across multiple platforms and devices, there is a need to investigate suitable gestural inputs, its effectiveness and acceptance of such interaction techniques. In this paper, we present a study conducted to investigate four suitable gestural input methods (i) Grabbing (ii) Pointing (iii) Hand motion in 2D plane and (iv) Body movement in 3D space for menu selection, their performance and acceptance for gesture-controlled user interfaces using a game "Treasure Hunt". Study was conducted with two different sets of 20-20 participants in public and private environment. We investigated the gestures from participants for their ranking preferences, social acceptance (user and spectator) and positive-negativeaffect after experiencing each menu selection method. Each selection method was also evaluated for its usability through collecting error rates and task completion time. These parameters were analyzed for exploring trends within and between environments. We observed that Grabbing was most preferred for both public and private environment, however it took significantly higher time to complete the task. Pointing and Hand Motion in 2D Plane found most errors in both environments. Higher social acceptance was found in public environment than private environment. We also present subjective analysis and discuss them in detail.