A procedure for developing intuitive and ergonomic gesture interfaces for man-machine interaction

Abstract

Many disciplines of multimedia and communication go towards ubiquitous computing and hand free interaction with computers. Application domains in this direction involve virtual reality, augmented reality, wearable computing, and smart spaces. This paper presents two main approaches to developing and testing these interfaces using gestures. It presents the important issues in gesture communication, from a technological viewpoint as well as a user viewpoint such as the technological complexity, learning rate, ergonomics, and intuition. These issues must be taken into account when choosing the gesture vocabulary. A procedure is proposed which includes those issues in the selection of gestures, and to test the resulting set of gestures. The procedure is tested and demonstrated on an example application with a small test group. The procedure is concluded to be useful and time consuming. The importance of using theory from ergonomics is also concluded.