Advantages and Drawbacks of Gesture-based Interaction

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Computer Science - Miscellaneous, grade: 1.0, LMU Munich (Institut für Informatik), course: Proseminar Medieninformatik, language: English, abstract: With the increasing prevalence of smartphones, gesture-based interaction has arrived in our everyday life, but we still do not exploit its full potential. This paper describes the benefits and drawbacks of gestural input and presents interaction techniques that address these drawbacks.
Gestures provide the user with a new form of interaction that mirrors their experience in the real world. They feel natural and require neither interruption nor an additional device. Furthermore, they do not limit the user to a single point of input, but instead offer various forms of interaction.
However, gestures also raise issues that are not relevant with traditional methods of input. The need to be learned and remembered, which requires the development of guides that promote the discoverability and memorability of these gestures and deal with input and recognition errors. Another aspect is the design of the gestures itself, which should make them memorable and easy and comfortable to execute.