Hand Gesture Preferences Analysis for a Virtual Reality Scenario

Virtual Reality has been successfully used to implement highly motivating learning environments where learners interact with the represented environment using hand gestures. However, little has been done in order to study which are the most convenient gestures for implementing this interaction in order to discover good practices for HCI. This investigation proposes a guideline for gesture evaluation based on user experience, in the scenario of small children learning words of a foreign language. Particularly, it provides a starting point by contrasting two gestures per action for selecting, moving and inspecting objects in a virtual environment. This study found out that these gestures were not indistinguishable. Instead, children have a clear preference for each action according to several indicators, which enabled us to establish a ranking of gesture preference for each action. Further research may expand the experiment by including additional gestures and actions.