On free-hand TV control: experimental results on user-elicited gestures with Leap Motion

We present insights from a gesture elicitation study conducted for TV control, during which 18 participants contributed gesture commands and rated the execution difficulty and recall likeliness of free-hand gestures for 21 television control tasks. Our study complements previous work on gesture interaction design for the TV set with the first exploration of fine-grained resolution 3-D finger movements and hand gestures . We report lower agreement rates than previous gesture studies ( AR = . 158 ) with 72.8 % recall rate and 15.8 % false positives, results that are explained by the complexity and variability of unconstrained finger and hand gestures. However, our observations also confirm previous findings, such as people preferring related gestures for dichotomous tasks and more disagreement occurring for abstract tasks, such as “open browser” or “show the list of channels” for our specific TV scenario. To reach a better understanding of our participants’ preferences for articulating finger and hand gestures, we defined five measures for Leap Motion gestures, such as gesture volume and finger-to-palm distance , which we employed to evaluate gestures performed by our participants. We also contribute a set of guidelines for practitioners interested in designing free-hand gestures for interactive TV scenarios involving similar gesture acquisition technology. We release our dataset consisting in 378 Leap Motion gestures described by fingertips position, direction, and velocity coordinates to foster further studies in the community. This first exploration of viewers’ preferences for fine-grained resolution free-hand gestures for TV control represents one more step toward designing low-effort gesture interfaces for lean-back interaction with the TV set.