Abstract
Mid-air interaction involves touchless manipulations of digital content or remote devices, based on sensor tracking of body movements and gestures. There are no established, universal gesture vocabularies for mid-air interactions with digital content or remote devices based on sensor tracking of body movements and gestures. On the contrary, it is widely acknowledged that the identification of appropriate gestures depends on the context of use, thus the identification of mid-air gestures is an important design decision. The method of gesture elicitation is increasingly applied by designers to help them identify appropriate gesture sets for mid-air applications. This paper presents a review of elicitation studies in mid-air interaction based on a selected set of 47 papers published within 2011–2018. It reports on: (1) the application domains of mid-air interactions examined; (2) the level of technological maturity of systems at hand; (3) the gesture elicitation procedure and its variations; (4) the appropriateness criteria for a gesture; (5) participants number and profile; (6) user evaluation methods (of the gesture vocabulary); (7) data analysis and related metrics. This paper confirms that the elicitation method has been applied extensively but with variability and some ambiguity and discusses under-explored research questions and potential improvements of related research.
Highlights
Mid-air interaction is about touchless manipulations of digital content or remote devices, based on tracking of body movements, postures and gestures with non-intrusive sensors
There is a considerable variety of application domains of mid-air interaction research, as well as variability in terms of the technological maturity of systems at hand (Table 3)
Several studies employ mid-air interaction to improve the user experience (UX) of TVs (6 out of 47, 12.8%), which have evolved beyond the passive TV-watching paradigm into interactive multimedia devices with features like web browsing, content manipulation, media playback and so forth
Summary
Mid-air interaction is about touchless manipulations of digital content or remote devices, based on tracking of body movements, postures and gestures with non-intrusive sensors (or minimally-intrusive, mainly based on computer vision). The origins of mid-air interaction can be traced back in the late seventies in the MIT Media Room and the “Put That. Mid-air interaction is explored as an alternative or complementary interaction style in several application domains that require touchless manipulation like mobile [4] and desktop micro gestures [5], gesture-based control of the TV [6] and other “smart”. There is not an established, universal gesture vocabulary for typical mid-air manipulations in any of these aforementioned application domains. It is widely acknowledged that “each input method is best at something and worse at something else” [14] and that “there is no Multimodal Technologies and Interact. 2018, 2, 65; doi:10.3390/mti2040065 www.mdpi.com/journal/mti
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