Exploiting Distant Pointing Gestures for Object Selection in a Virtual Environment

Developing state of the art multimedia applications nowadays calls for the use of sophisticated visualisation and immersion techniques, commonly referenced as Virtual Reality. While Virtual Reality meanwhile reaches good results both in image quality and in fast user feedback using parallel computation techniques, the methods for interacting with these systems need to be improved. In this paper we introduce a multimedia application that uses a gesture-driven interface and, secondly, the architecture for an expandable gesture recognition system. After different gesture types for interaction in a virtual environment are discussed with respect to a required functionality, the implementation of a specific gesture detection module for distant pointing recognition is described, and the whole system design is tested for its task adequacy.