Summary:
Marsh and Watt performed a user study to determine how people represent different types of objects using only hand gestures. Gestures can be either substitutive (where the gestures act as if the object is being interacted with) or virtual (which describe the object in a virtual world).
The authors had 12 subjects of varying academic degree and major make gestures for the primitives circle, triangle, square, cube, cylinder, sphere, and pyramid. The users also gestured the complex and compound shapes for football, chair, French baguette, table, vase, car, house, and table-lamp. The users were told to gesture the describe the shapes with non-verbal hand gestures.
Overall, users used virtual hand depictions (75%) over substitutive (17.9%), with some objects having both gestures (7.1%). 3D shapes were always expressed with two hands, whereas primitives had some one-handed gestures (27.8%), like circle. Some objects were too hard for certain users to gesture, such as chair (4) and French baguette (1).
Discussion:
The user study was interesting in some respects, such as seeing how the majority of people describe objects by their virtual shapes, but overall I was disappointed by the paper. Images showing the various stages of depiction would have really helped, as well as actual answers from the questionnaire.
I was confused as to whether the authors were looking for only hand gestures or allowed full body movement, since the authors mention that they wanted hand gestures to the users but they did not seem to care that many users walked around the room. That's a pretty large detail that they glossed over.
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2 comments:
i think it's kind of ironic, your comment about wanting to see pictures. basically, users were asked to describe a given word using gestures. the authors record these gestures and then report them back to us as words in the paper. i don't know, it just seems a little counter-intuitive.
You and Brandon made interesting arguments about supplementing the user study with images. I'm siding with Brandon on this one because I didn't know how much of an influence a specific image would have on the users trying to gesturize (?) them. But then, I would have been at a lost of trying to do one for baguette since I had no clue what it looked like exactly (is it more like a bagel or more like a loaf). Oh man, I would have ruined the authors' user study.
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