Towards the Design of Effective Freehand Gestural Interaction for Interactive TV

TL;DR

This paper investigates freehand gestural interaction for interactive TV, exploring design factors and proposing guidelines to improve usability and comfort based on two empirical studies with a consumer sensor.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into design factors affecting freehand TV interaction and introduces effective gesture-based input methods and guidelines for better user experience.

Findings

Tactile and audio feedback do not significantly affect performance or preference.

Dual circle layout and expanding target selection improve text input ease and error tolerance.

Design guidelines for effective freehand gestural interaction are proposed.

Abstract

As interactive devices become pervasive, people are beginning to looking for more advanced interaction with televisions in the living room. Interactive television has the potential to offer a very engaging experience. But most common user tasks are still challenging with such systems, such as menu selection or text input. And little work has been done on understanding and sup-porting the effective design of freehand interaction with an TV in the living room. In this paper, we perform two studies investi-gating freehand gestural interaction with a consumer level sensor, which is suitable for TV scenarios. In the first study, we inves-tigate a range of design factors for tiled layout menu selection, including wearable feedback, push gesture depth, target size and position in motor space. The results show that tactile and audio feedback have no significant effect on performance and prefer-ence, and these results inform potential designs for high selection performance. In the second study, we investigate a common TV user task of text input using freehand gesture. We design and evaluate two virtual keyboard layouts and three freehand selec-tion methods. Results show that ease of use and error tolerance can be both achieved using a text entry method utilizing a dual circle layout and an expanding target selection technique. Finally, we propose design guidelines for effective, usable and com-fortable freehand gestural interaction for interactive TV based on the findings.