A novel taxonomy for gestural interaction techniques: considerations for automotive environments

A large variety of gestural interaction techniques is now available. In this article, we use a new taxonomic space [18] as a comparative structure to analyze the applicability of these techniques on automotive environment. The taxonomy plots a gestural interaction technique as a point in a space where the vertical axis denotes the semantic coverage of the technique, and the horizontal axis expresses the physical actions users are engaged in. In addition, syntactic modifiers are used to express the interpretation process of input tokens into semantics, as well as pragmatic modifiers to make explicit the level of indirections between users actions and system responses. In the taxonomy, the complexity of the gestural interaction lexicon, and the syntactic/pragmatic modifiers it is decorated with, are indexes of the cognitive load users are engaged in during the interaction. The integration of modern mobile devices, complex user interfaces and gestural interaction techniques into automotive environment rise the necessity to analyze gestural interaction technique from their cognitive load point of view.