User-defined gesture interaction for in-vehicle information systems

Gesture elicitation study, a technique emerging from the field of participatory design, has been extensively applied in emerging interaction and sensing technologies in recent years. However, traditional gesture elicitation study often suffers from the gesture disagreement and legacy bias problem and may not generate optimal gestures for a target system. This paper reports a research project on user-defined gestures for interacting with in-vehicle information systems. The main contribution of our research lies in a 3-stage, participatory design method we propose for deriving more reliable gestures than traditional gesture elicitation methods. Using this method, we generated a set of user-defined gestures for secondary tasks in an in-vehicle information system. Drawing on our research, we develop a set of design guidelines for freehand gesture design. We highlight the implications of this work for the gesture elicitation for all gestural interfaces.