Issues of gestural navigation in abstract information spaces

Navigating large multidimensional information spaces presents a set of unique problems for user interface design. The key challenge is not to provide fast and accurate object manipulation, but to prevent the user from getting “lost”, and to provide an intuitive way to move through the space. We have developed an interface that uses electrostatic field sensing to interpret natural hand gestures as motion controllers. We are investigating the conceptual models that provide intuitive mappings from hand gestures to movements in multidimensional information space.