[16] Shape Your Imagination: Iconic Gestural-Based Interaction (Marsh & Watt – 1998)

Current Mood: studious

Blogs I Commented On:

• Josh Johnston
• Pankaj Rajan
• Aaron Wolin

Summary:
This is an exploratory user study paper on iconic hand gestures. The goal of the paper was to test the hypothesis that iconic hand gestures were employable as an HCI technique for transferring spatial information. Their study was conducted on a group of 12 non-computer scientists by using 15 shapes and objects. These shapes and objects were split into two groups. The Primitive group had 2D and 3D geometric shapes found in most computer graphics systems, while the Complex and Compound group can be composed of one or more Primitive group shapes. The study discovered that iconic gestures were used throughout for the Primitive group, where users preferred to use two-handed virtual depiction. For the complex and compound objects, users preferred to described them using iconic two-handed gestures that accompanied or were substituted by pantomimic, deictic, and body gestures. Additionally, the authors found that all iconic hand gestures were formed immediately for shapes in the Primitive group, but had wide varying time for the Compound and Complex Group

Discussion:
This is a relatively early paper released about 10 years, so the results from the user study are quite limited for the type of work in our course. It is an interesting user that could possibly be modified and extended in order to derive results that would more benefit the types of things we envision for the course, especially considering the dearth of exploratory user studies in the field.