Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Shape your Imagination: Iconic Gestural Based Interaction

This paper is basically an observation study in which computer scientists are observing the iconic gesture of the people from different educational domains and trying to test the hypothesis if iconic gestures can be employed as the natural and intuitive HCI technique for transfer of spatial information. The subjects, 5 males and 7 females, were taken from variety of education domains like: Languages, Science, Politics, nutrition and health and Library with age ranging from 21-31 years.

Subjects were seated in a quiet room and presented with name of a shape or an object and were asked to convey the shape or an object using non verbal communication using hand gestures. The primitive shapes chosen were, circle, triangle, square, cube, cylinder, sphere and a pyramid. The complex shapes chosen were: Football, chair, French baguette, table, vase, car, house, table lamp. These shapes were presented in an order to the subjects.

It was observed from the study that subjects preferred to use two hands to draw the virtual description (i.e boundary tracing etc) for primitive as well as some simple 2D shapes. For the complex shapes, they tend to use the iconic gestures. It was observed that, subjects also used pantomimic, dialect and body gestures sometimes in conjugation or sometimes in place of the iconic gesture. Some of the items (mostly 3D complex) were found to be too complex for the users. Complex items also took a more time to generate representative gestures.





Disussion:



The paper is petty straight forward. This is a observational study and some commonly understood/ observed facts were studied spending some money. It would have been interesting if subjects would have been told to communicate some ideas/ sentences using gestures rather than just objects.

2 comments:

Brandon said...

expressing ideas and sentences using only gestures would probably be pretty hard, especially since the author mentioned that some users couldn't even express a simple object using gestures alone. that's probably why gestures would be best in a multi-modal system.

Paul Taele said...

I'm with Brandon on this one. I personally thought that the evaluation done this paper is easy to overlook due to its simplicity. Considering the silly gestures that the authors of the papers we've read have come up with, there should be more exploratory user studies of this nature to prevent stupid gesture creation. Only we can prevent stupid gesture creation.