Augmented Chironomia for Presenting Data to Remote Audiences

TL;DR

This paper introduces a touchless, gesture-based method for enhancing remote data presentations by enabling dynamic, expressive interactions with visualizations directly via hand tracking, improving engagement and communication.

Contribution

It presents a novel, touchless interaction technique combining hand tracking with dynamic charts for remote data presentation, enhancing engagement and expressiveness.

Findings

Effective hand tracking enables intuitive data interactions.

Participants found the approach engaging and expressive.

The method improves remote presentation dynamics.

Abstract

To facilitate engaging and nuanced conversations around data, we contribute a touchless approach to interacting directly with visualization in remote presentations. We combine dynamic charts overlaid on a presenter's webcam feed with continuous bimanual hand tracking, demonstrating interactions that highlight and manipulate chart elements appearing in the foreground. These interactions are simultaneously functional and deictic, and some allow for the addition of "rhetorical flourish", or expressive movement used when speaking about quantities, categories, and time intervals. We evaluated our approach in two studies with professionals who routinely deliver and attend presentations about data. The first study considered the presenter perspective, where 12 participants delivered presentations to a remote audience using a presentation environment incorporating our approach. The second study considered the audience experience of 17 participants who attended presentations supported by our environment. Finally, we reflect on observations from these studies and discuss related implications for engaging remote audiences in conversations about data.