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Where are you pointing?: the accuracy of deictic pointing in CVEs

Published: 10 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Deictic reference -- pointing at things during conversation -- is ubiquitous in human communication, and should also be an important tool in distributed collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). Pointing gestures can be complex and subtle, however, and pointing is much more difficult in the virtual world. In order to improve the richness of interaction in CVEs, it is important to provide better support for pointing and deictic reference, and a first step in this support is to determine how well people can interpret the direction that another person is pointing. To investigate this question, we carried out two studies. The first identified several ways that people point towards distant targets, and established that not all pointing requires high accuracy. This suggested that natural CVE pointing could potentially be successful; but no knowledge is available about whether even moderate accuracy is possible in CVEs. Therefore, our second study looked more closely at how accurately people can produce and interpret the direction of pointing gestures in CVEs. We found that although people are more accurate in the real world, the differences are smaller than expected; our results show that deixis can be successful in CVEs for many pointing situations, and provide a foundation for more comprehensive support of deictic pointing.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2010
2690 pages
ISBN:9781605589299
DOI:10.1145/1753326
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 10 April 2010

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  1. avatars
  2. cves
  3. gestures
  4. pointing

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  • (2024)Perception of pointing gestures in 3D spaceScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-024-78129-414:1Online publication date: 11-Nov-2024
  • (2023)Speech-Augmented Cone-of-Vision for Exploratory Data AnalysisProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581283(1-18)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2023)VRGit: A Version Control System for Collaborative Content Creation in Virtual RealityProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581136(1-14)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
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  • (2023)MAGIC: Manipulating Avatars and Gestures to Improve Remote Collaboration2023 IEEE Conference Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR)10.1109/VR55154.2023.00059(438-448)Online publication date: Mar-2023
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