The Gesture Disagreement Problem in Free-hand Gesture Interaction

Accurately understanding a user's intention is often essential to the success of any interactive system. An information retrieval system, for example, should address the vocabulary problem (Furnas et al., 1987) to accommodate different query terms users may choose. A system that supports natural user interaction (e.g., full-body game and immersive virtual reality) must recognize gestures that are chosen by users for an action. This article reports an experimental study on the gesture choice for tasks in three application domains. We found that the chance for users to produce the same gesture for a given task is below 0.355 on average, and offering a set of gesture candidates can improve the agreement score. We discuss the characteristics of those tasks that exhibit the gesture disagreement problem and those tasks that do not. Based on our findings, we propose some design guidelines for free-hand gesture-based interfaces.