Comparing head gesture, hand gesture and gamepad interfaces for answering Yes/No questions in virtual environments

A potential application of gesture recognition algorithms is to use them as interfaces to interact with virtual environments. However, the performance and the user preference of such interfaces in the context of virtual reality (VR) have been rarely studied. In the present paper, we focused on a typical VR interaction scenario-answering Yes/No questions in VR systems to compare the performance and the user preference of three types of interfaces. These interfaces included a head gesture interface, a hand gesture interface and a conventional gamepad interface. We designed a memorization task, in which participants were asked to memorize several everyday objects presented in a virtual room and later respond to questions on whether they saw a specific object through the given interfaces when these objects were absent. The performance of the interfaces was evaluated in terms of the real-time accuracy and the response time. A user interface questionnaire was also used to reveal the user preference for these interfaces. The results showed that head gesture is a very promising interface, which can be easily added to existing VR systems for answering Yes/No questions and other binary responses in virtual environments.