Providing Visual Support for Selecting Reactive Elements in Intelligent Environments

When realizing gestural interaction in a typical living environment there often is an offset between user-perceived and machine-perceived direction of pointing, which can hinder reliable selection of elements in the surroundings. This work presents a support system that provides visual feedback to a freely gesturing user; thus enabling reliable selection of and interaction with reactive elements in intelligent environments. We have created a prototype that is showcasing this feedback method based on gesture recognition using the Microsoft Kinect and visual support provision using a custom built laser-robot. Finally an evaluation has been performed, in order to prove the efficiency of such a system, acquire usability feedback and determine potential learning effects for gesture-based interaction.