Influence of cultural factors on freehand gesture design

Abstract In the design of gesture-based user interfaces, gesture elicitation methods are often used to obtain gesture preferences of end users. User choices of gestures can be affected by various factors, such as their cultural backgrounds. Considering cultural factors in designing gesture-based interfaces is important to systems that target for users from different cultures. However, so little empirical research has been conducted on the impact of cultures on gesture commands. This paper reports a study with a series of three experiments on the gesture preferences for tasks in three different application domains with participants from two cultures. We find that some gesture choices are strongly influenced by the cultural background of participants. We discuss the characteristics of those gestures that exhibit cultural dependence and those tasks that do not. We also provide some design guidelines for freehand gesture-based interfaces.