Interactive Public Displays: A Gesture-Based Proposal Using Kinect

Abstract

The use of interactive public displays in urban spaces is increasing very fast, and new setups to support these displays are still being explored. In this paper we introduce a gesture based input technique to allow the interaction with public displays avoiding the use of any device attached to the user body. The gestures supported provide navigation, selection and manipulation of objects, as well as panning and zooming on the screen. In order to evaluate how robust the system is in a real public scenario, criteria that could interfere on the interactive task are evaluated, as the amount of brightness in the environment, and the presence of other persons. The setup used to support the tests include a 55” LED TV, a Kinect for gestures capture, and a new algorithm to allow the identification of closing and opening hands. Three test scenarios are described in this paper: the interactive visualization of a graph representing the academic genealogical tree of our University; the selection and manipulation of simple objects; and the free interaction with the map of a building. Given the results of the performed tasks, we conclude that the system, although not behaving very accurately in all situations, has potential to be used on many applications.