The Gesture Authoring Space: Authoring Customised Hand Gestures for Grasping Virtual Objects in Immersive Virtual Environments
This work addresses the need for more intuitive interaction methods in virtual reality for users, but it is incremental as it builds on existing gesture recognition techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of creating natural hand gestures for grabbing virtual objects in immersive environments by developing a gesture authoring tool that uses template matching, requiring no technical knowledge. In a user study, gestures created with this approach were perceived as more natural than pinch gestures or controllers, though no concrete numbers were provided for accuracy or time.
Natural user interfaces are on the rise. Manufacturers for Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality head mounted displays are increasingly integrating new sensors into their consumer grade products, allowing gesture recognition without additional hardware. This offers new possibilities for bare handed interaction within virtual environments. This work proposes a hand gesture authoring tool for object specific grab gestures allowing virtual objects to be grabbed as in the real world. The presented solution uses template matching for gesture recognition and requires no technical knowledge to design and create custom tailored hand gestures. In a user study, the proposed approach is compared with the pinch gesture and the controller for grasping virtual objects. The different grasping techniques are compared in terms of accuracy, task completion time, usability, and naturalness. The study showed that gestures created with the proposed approach are perceived by users as a more natural input modality than the others.