Gesture Vocabulary for Natural Interaction with Virtual Museums Case Study: A Process Created and Tested Within a Bilingual Deaf Children School

摘要

The research described in this paper aimed at creating a gesture interface for a 3D virtual museum developed by a research group of Image Processing. Faced to the challenge of using sound methodologies in order to create a genuine natural interface, the group joined to a Computer Human Interaction group that has worked for seven years focusing the social inclusion and development of Deaf Communities. In this context, the research investigated the state-of-the-art of Natural Interaction and gestures vocabulary creation in related literature and placed the case study at a bilingual school (Brazilian Sign Language and written Portuguese) for deaf children. The paper reports the results of some specially relevant works from literature and describes the process of developing the vocabulary together with its validation. As the main contributions of this research, we can mention the addition of a previous state – the observation of potential users interacting with the physical scenario that motivates the innovative virtual uses in order to investigate the actions and gestures used n the physical environment – to a well known author's process that has as its starting point the set of expected functions and the exemplification of a more active way of bringing potential users to the stage of defining the right gestures vocabulary, which brings more help than just interacting with users to get their opinion (asking them to match a feature to the gesture they would like to use to employ it or demonstrating a gesture and seeing what feature users would expect that gesture to trigger). Finally, the paper establishes the limitations of the results and proposes future research.