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Controlling an avatar's pointing gestures in desktop collaborative virtual environments

Published: 27 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) allow people to interact with each other in virtual worlds through computer-generated avatars. Avatars are much less expressive than real bodies, and one main limitation is their lack of support for non-verbal communication such as pointing gestures. Part of the problem is that these gestures must be created through an input device, but the user is already busy controlling the avatar's location, rotation, and view direction. Pointing gestures are only useful for collaborative communication if they can be controlled simultaneously with all other avatar actions. To determine whether there are input configurations that make pointing gestures feasible, we carried out a study that compared five different widely-available input devices in three non-verbal communication tasks. We found that users were able to successfully incorporate pointing gestures into tasks that already involved moving, turning, and looking, but that there were significant and substantial differences between devices. Two configurations performed best: a mode-switched version of standard mouse-and-keyboard control, and a direct-pointing scheme using a Wii remote. There were also minor effects of gender and video-game experience. Our study suggests that users will be able to successfully create free pointing gestures in CVEs, greatly improving the communicative richness of these environments.

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Cited By

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  • (2021)The Effects of Virtual Avatar Visibility on Pointing Interpretation by Observers in 3D Environments2021 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR)10.1109/ISMAR52148.2021.00019(50-59)Online publication date: Oct-2021
  • (2015)Validating Test Chambers to Study Cooperative Communication Mechanics in Portal 2Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play10.1145/2793107.2810302(721-726)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2015
  • (2014)Support for deictic pointing in CVEsProceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing10.1145/2531602.2531691(1377-1387)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2014
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Conferences
GROUP '12: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work
October 2012
342 pages
ISBN:9781450314862
DOI:10.1145/2389176
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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Publication History

Published: 27 October 2012

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Author Tags

  1. cves
  2. deictic pointing
  3. gestural communication

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Group '12
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Group '12: ACM 2012 International Conference on Support Group Work
October 27 - 31, 2012
Florida, Sanibel Island, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 125 of 405 submissions, 31%

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View all
  • (2021)The Effects of Virtual Avatar Visibility on Pointing Interpretation by Observers in 3D Environments2021 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR)10.1109/ISMAR52148.2021.00019(50-59)Online publication date: Oct-2021
  • (2015)Validating Test Chambers to Study Cooperative Communication Mechanics in Portal 2Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play10.1145/2793107.2810302(721-726)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2015
  • (2014)Support for deictic pointing in CVEsProceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing10.1145/2531602.2531691(1377-1387)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2014
  • (2013)Villains, architects and micro-managersProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2470654.2470754(705-714)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2013

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