Grasping Gestures: Gesturing with Physical Artifacts
Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing (2011), 25, 255–271. # Cambridge University Press 2011 0890-0604/11 $25.00 doi:10.1017/S0890060411000072 Grasping gestures: Gesturing with physical artifacts 1 2 ELISE VAN DEN HOVEN AND ALI MAZALEK 1User-Centered Engineering Group, Industrial Design Department, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands 2Synaesthetic Media Lab, Digital Media Program, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA (RECEIVED July 19, 2010; ACCEPTED October 6, 2010) Abstract Gestures play an important role in communication. They support the listener, who is trying to understand the speaker. How- ever, they also support the speaker by facilitating the conceptualization and verbalization of messages and reducing cog- nitive load. Gestures thus play an important role in collaboration and also in problem-solving tasks. In human–computer interaction, gestures are also used to facilitate communication with digital applications, because their expressive nature can enable less constraining and more intuitive digital interactions than conventional user interfaces. Although gesture re- search in the social sciences typically considers empty-handed gestures, digital gesture interactions often make use of hand- held objects or touch surfaces to capture gestures that would be difficult to track in free space. In most cases, the physical objects used to make these gestures serve primarily as a means of sensing or input. In contrast, tangible interaction makes use of physical objects as embodiments of digital information. The physical objects in a tangible interface thus serve as representations as well as controls for the digital information they are associated with. Building on this concept, gesture interaction has the potential to make use of the physical properties of hand-held objects to enhance or change the function- ality of the gestures made.
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