Shape Your Imagination: Iconic Gestural-Based Interaction (Marsh, Watt)

This work revolves around a user study to determine how people make iconic hand gestures to convey spatial information, with the expectation that 3D gestures can be used to create/sculpt 3D objects in a virtual space. They questioned if people use iconic hand gestures while trying to communicate shapes and objects without speaking, and if so, how frequently do iconic gestures occur, what types are used, and do people prefer to make these gestures with one or two hands? They chose 15 objects for people to describe nonverbally, including primitives such as circle and pyramid, as well as complex and compound objects like chair, french baguette, and house. They found that users did use iconic hand gestures to describe all shapes. With primitives, subjects preferred to use 2-handed virtual depiction (tracing an outline in space). With complex shapes, subjects used iconic two-handed gestures as well as pantomimic, diectic, and body gestures when iconic gestures were not sufficient. Users had no trouble recalling gestures they'd made.

Discussion:

This is an interesting study, but I think there would be more information they could have gotten at the same time. I think it would be interesting to know to what extent users made similar gestures, or whether they could recognize each other's gestures without seeing the card with the object name. I suppose with just the motivation of allowing intuitive 3D sculpting, rather than recognition of gestures, their study makes pretty good sense.