How we gesture towards machines: an exploratory study of user perceptions of gestural interaction

This paper explores if people perceive and perform touchless gestures differently when communicating with technology vs. with humans. Qualitative reports from a lab study of 10 participants revealed that people perceive differences in the speed of performing gestures, sense of enjoyment, feedback from the communication target. Preliminary analysis of 1200 gesture trials of motion capture data showed that hand shapes were less taut when communicating to technology. These differences provide implications for the design of gestural user interfaces that use symbolic gestures borrowed from human multimodal communication.