A Comparison of Head Pose and Deictic Pointing Interaction Methods for Smart Environments

Abstract

Pointing is one of the more meaningful gestures in human expression. In this article, deictic and head pose pointing methods are evaluated as interaction means, with the objective of comparing their efficiency and delivered comfort, usability, and user experience to apply them to the deployment of services in smart spaces. Standard tools and questionnaires are applied in a user study with 20 individuals who have tried a Kinect V2-enabled pointing system to a) complete a multidirectional International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9241-9 pointing task and b) test a service to command smart objects. The results show that both deictic and head pose interaction perform in a similar way, providing a throughput of 2.14 and 2.04 bits/s, respectively (comparable to joysticks or touchpads in equivalent ISO tasks). The system being quite robust to the user position in the Kinect coverage area, target size influences performance, but also learnability and the overall response when cursor visual cues are not available. From comfort, usability, and user experience responses, it can be said that deictic is perceived to perform better than head pose in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and organization, although head pose is preferred for its speed.

Notes

¹ Myo device: https://www.thalmic.com/myo/.

² Pebble watch device: https://getpebble.com.

³ Nod device: https://nod.com/.

⁴ Kinect SDK: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/develop/default.aspx

⁵ The quaternion for face orientation is available through the function Microsoft.Kinect.Face.FaceFrameResult.FaceRotationQuaternio in the nFace tracking SDK https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj130970.aspx

⁶ Calibration toolbox for Matlab: (http://www.vision.caltech.edu/bouguetj/calib_doc/

⁷ Digital Living Network Alliance is a group of electronic companies that are together to develop and promote interoperability guidelines for sharing digital media among multimedia devices.

⁸ ISO 9249-1: http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=30030

⁹ User Experience Questionnaire tools: http://www.ueq-online.org

Additional information

Funding

This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under grant TEC2014-55146-R and the Technical University of Madrid under grant RP150955017.

Notes on contributors

Ana M. Bernardos

Dr. Ana M. Bernardos is an associate professor in the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Her current research interests lie in the intersection of ubiquitous computing, human–computer interaction, and data fusion. In these areas, she has led and participated in numerous research projects and co-authored more than 80 articles.

David Gómez

David Gómez received a MS degree in Computer Science and Telecommunications Engineering in 2009 and 2013, respectively. He is currently a PhD candidate in the field of novel methods for interaction in smart environments.

José R. Casar

Prof. José R. Casar holds a Chair in the Department of Signals, Systems and Radiocommunications at UPM. An expert on optimization and signal processing, he has directed more than 70 research and development projects and published more than 200 articles. He has been the supervisor of 14 PhD theses and served in numerous evaluation committees.