The Social Acceptability of Peripheral Interaction with 3D Gestures in a Simulated Setting

We investigate the effects of social context on the acceptability of 3D (touchless) gestures used to control a music system. We also focus on the extent to which gesture control can be regarded as peripheral interaction [3]. We first identified six gestures for player control to use in the social acceptability study. Next, we used a Wizard-of-Oz design to investigate social acceptability by inviting user dyads (N = 24 participants) to a living room setting where they were assigned the roles of host or guest. The host used gestures to control the music system responding to cues while the guest engaged them in a distractor task. We video recorded the interaction and interviewed participants separately about their experiences. We found no reservations from either male, female, mature or young users about gesture interaction, and no distinction between groups with respect to social acceptability. Taken together, this suggests that gesture control is socially acceptable for all users. We analysed gaze direction when gesturing based on the video recordings. Using this as an indicator for user attention we also found evidence that gesture control can indeed exist in the periphery of attention.