An Elicitation Study on Gesture Attitudes and Preferences Towards an Interactive Hand-Gesture Vocabulary

With the introduction of new depth sensing technologies, interactive hand-gesture devices are rapidly emerging. However, the hand-gestures used in these devices do not follow a common vocabulary, making certain control command device-specific. In this paper we present an initial effort to create a standardized interactive hand-gesture vocabulary for the next generation of television applications. We conduct a user-elicitation study using a survey in order to define a common vocabulary for specific control commands, such as Volume up/down, Menu open/close, etc. This survey is entirely user-oriented and thus it has two phases. In the first phase, we ask open questions about specific commands. In the second phase, we use the answers suggested from the first phase to create a multiple choice questionnaire. Based on the results from the survey, we study the gesture attitudes and preferences between gender groups, and between age groups with a quantitative and qualitative statistical analysis. Finally, the hand-gesture vocabulary is derived after applying an agreement analysis on the user-elicited gestures. The proposed methodology for gesture set design is comparable with existing methodologies and yields higher agreement levels than relevant user-elicited studies in the field.