Midair Gestural Techniques for Translation Tasks in Large-Display Interaction

Abstract

Midair gestural interaction has gained a lot of attention over the past decades, with numerous attempts to apply midair gestural interfaces with large displays (and TVs), interactive walls, and smart meeting rooms. These attempts, reviewed in numerous studies, utilized differing gestural techniques for the same action making them inherently incomparable, which further makes it difficult to summarize recommendations for the development of midair gestural interaction applications. Therefore, the aim was to take a closer look at one common action, translation, that is defined as dragging (or moving) an entity to a predefined target position while retaining the entity’s size and rotation. We compared performance and subjective experiences (participants = 30) of four midair gestural techniques (i.e., by fist, palm, pinch, and sideways) in the repetitive translation of 2D objects to short and long distances with a large display. The results showed statistically significant differences in movement time and error rate favoring translation by palm over pinch and sideways at both distances. Further, fist and sideways gestural techniques showed good performances, especially at short and long distances correspondingly. We summarize the implications of the results for the design of midair gestural interfaces, which would be useful for interaction designers and gesture recognition researchers.