Gestural interaction in Virtual Environments: user studies and applications

With the currently available technology, there has been an increased interest in the development of virtual reality (VR) applications, some of those already becoming commercial products. This fact also rose many issues related to their usability. One of the main challenges is the design of interfaces to interact with these immersive virtual environments (IVE), in particular for those setups relying on hand tracking as a mean of input and in general with devices that stray away from the standard choices such as keyboards and mice. Finding appropriate ways to deal with the usability issues is key to the success of applications in VR, not only for entertainment purposes but also for professional application in medical and engineering field. The research on this topic in the last years has been quite active and several problems were identified as relevant to achieve satisfying usability results. This research project aims to tackle some of those critical aspects strictly related to interaction in IVEs. It is firstly focused on object manipulation. An initial evaluation allowed us to highlight the nature of some critical issues from which we derived some design guidelines for manipulation techniques. We proposed a different number of solutions and performed user tests to validate them. Secondly, we tried to verify the feasibility of gestural interfaces in applications by developing and testing a gesture recognition algorithm based on 3D hand trajectories. This work showed promising results in terms of accuracy hinting at the possibility of a reliable gestural interface for VR applications.