Designing a user-defined gesture vocabulary for an in-vehicle climate control system

Hand gestures are a suitable interface medium for in-vehicle interfaces. They are intuitive and natural to perform, and less visually demanding while driving. This paper aims at analysing human gestures to define a preliminary gesture vocabulary for in-vehicle climate control using a driving simulator. We conducted a user-elicitation experiment on 22 participants performing two driving scenarios with different levels of cognitive load. The participants were filmed while performing natural gestures for manipulating the air-conditioning inside the vehicle. Comparisons are drawn between the proposed approach to define a vocabulary using 9 new gestures (GestDrive) and previously suggested methods. The outcomes demonstrate that GestDrive is successful in describing the employed gestures in detail.