Understanding Hand Degrees of Freedom and Natural Gestures for 3D Interaction on Tabletop

Rémi Brouet (1, 2) , Renaud Blanch (3) , Marie-Paule Cani (1)

1 IMAGINE - Intuitive Modeling and Animation for Interactive Graphics & Narrative Environments
2 IIHM - Ingénierie de l’Interaction Homme-Machine
3 LIG - Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble

Interactively creating and editing 3D content requires the manipulation of many degrees of freedom (DoF). For instance, docking a virtual object involves 6 DoF (position and orientation). Multi-touch surfaces are good candidates as input devices for those interactions: they provide a direct manipulation where each finger contact on the table controls 2 DoF. This leads to a theoretical upper bound of 10 DoF for a single-handed interaction. With a new hand parameterization, we investigate the number of DoF that one hand can effectively control on a multi-touch surface. A first experiment shows that the dominant hand is able to perform movements that can be parameterized by 4 to 6 DoF, and no more (i.e., at most 3 fingers can be controlled inde-pendently). Through another experiment, we analyze how gestures and tasks are associated, which enable us to discover some principles for designing 3D inter-actions on tabletop.

Mots clés: 3D Manipulation; Multi-Touch Interaction; Tabletop Interaction; Gesture-based Interaction; Interaction

Domaines: Modélisation et simulation

Rémi Brouet, Renaud Blanch, Marie-Paule Cani. Understanding Hand Degrees of Freedom and Natural Gestures for 3D Interaction on Tabletop. 14th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (INTERACT), IFIP, Sep 2013, Cape Town, South Africa. pp.297-314, ⟨10.1007/978-3-642-40483-2_20⟩. ⟨hal-00814014v2⟩