A Kinect-based system to enable interaction by pointing in smart spaces

Pointing is a universal gesture that naturally expresses interest or attraction towards the pointed items. If some `magic' is added, the gesture may also make these items perform actions. In this paper, we describe a system that enables to interact by pointing with digital or physical controllable resources distributed in a smart space. The system facilitates building an interactive room using COTS devices, in particular a pair of Kinect sensors. The pointing direction is inferred from the user's elbow-wrist vector, which together with a secondary elbow-object vector serves to filter the controllable objects in the area of pointing. Experiments with 8 users in a real setting demonstrate the feasibility of the concept and show that the accuracy of the system is very dependent on the relative position user-resource and on the user behaviour itself.