Designing touchless gestural interactions for public displays in-the-wild

Public displays, typically equipped with touchscreens, are used for interactions in public spaces, such as streets or fairs. Currently low-cost visual sensing technologies, such as Kinect-like devices and high quality cameras, allow to easily implement touchless interfaces. Nevertheless, the arising interactions have not yet been fully investigated for public displays in-the-wild (i.e. in appropriate social contexts where public displays are typically deployed). Different audiences, cultures and social settings strongly affect users and their interactions. Besides gestures for public displays must be guessable to be easy to use for a wide audience. Issues like these could be solved with user-centered design: gestures must be chosen by users in different social settings, and then selected to be resilient to cultural bias and provide a good level of guessability. Therefore the main challenge is to define touchless gestures in-the-wild by using novel UCD methods applied out of controlled environments, and evaluating their effectiveness. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.