Empirically Measuring Control Quality of Gesture Input

As new input devices emerge new paradigms of interaction must emerge with them. Recent advances in technology have lowered the cost of gesture-based hardware, enabling them to be adopted by and integrated into mainstream applications. Given the novelty of these devices, however, little is known about how this form of interaction can be integrated into existing computing paradigms or how it compares with existing input methods. It is therefore important to examine the role of gesture control across current applications in various contexts. While gesture-based input is likely to yield a variety of novel interaction techniques for immersive 3D environments, it is important to understand how spatial controls map to 2D interfaces and how lessons learned in the 2D space map into these 3D environments. In this paper, we present the results of a study of using gesture alone to control a top-down shooter game using two novel techniques; interaction via a gamepad was used to establish a baseline of performance. We measured users' performance of basic tasks (moving and aiming), and then utilized a subjective post-study survey. The motivation of this study is not to directly compare the performance of the gamepad with gesture controls (given a time-on-task bias in favor of gamepad control), but rather to establish a baseline of expected user performance for those with no prior gesture-based experience. The contributions of this research include the design and evaluation of two new gesture-based techniques for 2D control and the presentation and analysis of our results.