Demographic Effects on Mid-Air Gesture Preference for Control of Devices: Implications for Design

After eliciting 129 potential task-gesture combinations for 23 Smart TV tasks with a Canadian sample (N = 22), we then conducted studies that collected participant preference scores on mid-air bare-hand gestures for TV control in both Canada (N = 747) and China (N = 300), and we analyzed the effect of characteristics of individual participants on gesture preference scores. The results showed that age and cultural differences are important in determining task-gesture preferences. While exploratory, the present results indicate a need for more research in this area and suggest that one of two possible strategies may need to be adopted in designing future gesture interactions: 1) develop customized task-gesture combinations for different cultures and different age groups; 2) develop a core set of task-gesture combination possibilities and let users choose which gesture they want to use for each task.