Mainstreaming gesture based interfaces

Gestures are a common way of interaction with mobile devices. They emerged especially with the iPhone production. Gestures in currently used devices are usually based on the original gestures presented by Apple in its iOS (iPhone Operating System). Therefore, there is a wide agreement on the mobile gesture design. In last years, it is possible to see experiments with gesture usage also in the other areas of consumer electronics and computers. The examples can include televisions, large projections etc. These gestures can be marked as spatial or 3D gestures. They are connected with a natural 3D environment rather than with a flat 2D screen. Nevertheless, it is hard to find a comparable design agreement within the spatial gestures. Various projects are based on completely different gesture sets. This situation is confusing for their users and slows down spatial gesture adoption.This paper is focused on the standardization of spatial gestures. The review of projects focused on spatial gesture usage is provided in the first part. The main emphasis is placed on the usability point-of-view. On the basis of our analysis, we argue that the usability is the key issue enabling the wide adoption. The mobile gesture emergence was possible easily because the iPhone gestures were natural. Therefore, it was not necessary to learn them.The design and implementation of our presentation software, which is controlled by gestures, is outlined in the second part of the paper. Furthermore, the usability testing results are provided as well. We have tested our application on a group of users not instructed in the implemented gestures design. These results were compared with the other ones, obtained with our original implementation. The evaluation can be used as the basis for implementation of similar projects.