Leap gestures for TV: insights from an elicitation study

We present insights from a gesture elicitation study in the context of interacting with TV, during which 18 participants contributed and rated the execution difficulty and recall likeliness of free-hand gestures for 21 distinct TV tasks. Our study complements previous work on gesture interaction design for the TV set with the first exploration of fine-grained resolution 3-D finger movements and hand pose gestures. We report lower agreement rates (.20) than previous gesture studies and 72.8% recall rate and 15.8% false positive recall, results that are explained by the complexity and variability of unconstrained finger gestures. Nevertheless, we report a large 82% preference for gesture commands versus TV remote controls. We also confirm previous findings, such as people's preferences for related gestures for dichotomous tasks, and we report low agreement rates for abstract tasks, such as "open browser" or "show channels list" in our specific TV scenario. In the end, we contribute a set of design guidelines for practitioners interested in free-hand finger and hand pose gestures for interactive TV scenarios, and we release a dataset of 378 Leap Motion gesture records consisting in finger position, direction, and velocity coordinates for further studies in the community. We see this exploration as a first step toward designing low-effort high-resolution finger gestures and hand poses for lean-back interaction with the TV set.