Markerless gesture based interaction for design review scenarios

In this article we describe the prototype of a gesture based interface for design review scenarios and its evaluation. The prototype uses computer vision methods to analyze the camera images obtained from a calibrated stereo camera setup and allows for the manipulation of 3 dimensional objects with hand gestures. The gestures performed by the user are translated into commands by a gesture interaction server. The commands are sent to the client software, a renderer called ViNCE, which is a part of the COVISE visualization software. The gesture interface was evaluated in a user study with 17 participants. The evaluation results confirmed our assumption that gestural interfaces are a valuable utility for modern designers and engineers whose primary field of work includes large amounts of 3 dimensional data. In the future we will continue development of the gestural interface, by improving its reliability and broadening its functional range.