Cuenesics: using mid-air gestures to select items on interactive public displays

Abstract

Most of today's public displays only show predefined contents that passers-by are not able to change. We argue that interactive public displays would benefit from immediately usable mid-air techniques for choosing options, expressing opinions or more generally selecting one among several items. We propose a design space for hand-gesture based mid-air selection techniques on interactive public displays, along with four specific techniques that we evaluated at three different locations in the the field. Our findings include: 1) if no hint is provided, people successfully use Point+Dwell for selecting items, 2) the user representation could be switched from Mirror to Cursor after registration without causing confusion, 3) people tend to explore items before confirming one, 4) in a public context, people frequently interact inadvertently (without looking at the screen). We conclude by providing recommendations for designers of interactive public displays to support immediate usability for mid-air selection.