Elicitation and Evaluation of Zoom Gestures for Touchless Interaction with Desktop Displays

Touchless gestural interaction has been widely studied and adopted in many contexts. Furthermore, the growing availability of low-cost enabling devices, such as Kinect or Leap Motion, boosted up the interest in such interaction both for commercial and scientific purposes, both for large public displays and for personal displays. The problem of choosing the right touchless gesture for the right action is thus still an open issue, depending on several aspects, such as context, purpose, users' culture, etc. In this work, we first present the results of a gesture elicitation study that allowed us to identify a set of touchless gestures for performing zoom actions while interacting with desktop displays. Next, we present a second user study for evaluating perceived workload, usability and effectiveness of the elicited gestures, showing a clear preference towards one. %Such findings represent a significant contribution for future design of touchless gestural interfaces for desktop and/or laptop computers.