Usability Study of Static/Dynamic Gestures and Haptic Input as Interfaces to 3D Games

In this paper, the quality of the interaction of users with a 3D game using different modalities is studied. Three different interaction methods with a 3D virtual environment are considered: a haptic 3D mouse, natural static gestures (postures), and natural dynamic (kinetics) gestures. Through a comprehensive user experiment we compared the pre-defined natural gestures to each other and also to a haptic interface which is designed for the same game. The experiments analyze precision (error), efficiency (time), ease-of-use, pleasantness, fatigue, naturalness, mobility, and overall satisfaction as evaluation criteria. We also used user-selected ranks of importance as weight values for evaluation criteria to measure the overall satisfaction. Finally, our user experiment presents a learning curve for each of the three input methods which along with the other findings can be a good source for further research in the field of natural multimodal Human-Computer Interaction. Keywords— Usability study, static/dynamic gestures, haptics, 3D game, human factors.