Vision Based Hand Gesture Interfaces for Wearable Computing and ...

Chapter 8. Hand Gestures in Application
items to visualization environments. Hand gestures make for a very natural input
interface for spatial data and a few key hand postures enable their use to perform
simple action sequences entirely with gestures. Finally, the trackball provides for
exact, continuous 1-dimensional input for situations where hand gestures are less
convenient or 3-dimensional input is desired.
8.7.6 Benefits of HandVu for powerful interfaces
The benefits of using HandVu and our multimodal interface to control the
powerful and complex application functionality became most apparent during the
early stages of outdoor system deployment. All application parameters were ini-
tially controlled through a keyboard and mouse interface that required access to
the two laptop computers. We could only achieve this by spreading out the hard-
ware on a bench (aside from the head-worn components), prohibiting almost all
user mobility. Furthermore, immersion in the head-worn display made the in-
teraction virtually impossible and a second person had to operate keyboard and
mouse on command of the HMD wearer. The ring trackball, see Figure 8.9, along
with a keyboard held by the main user improved matters, but this was obviously
still significantly flawed. It was not until we had most input functionality from
the speech and gesture recognition available that the system became less cumber-
some to operate. Finally, we were able to completely stow away all computational
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