A Novel Human-3DTV Interaction System Based on Free Hand Gestures and a Touch-Based Virtual Interface

The input method based on free-hand gestures has gradually become a hot research direction in the field of human-computer interaction. Hand gestures like sign languages, however, demand quite a lot of knowledge and practice for interaction, and air writing methods require their users to hold the arm and hand in mid-air for a period of time. These methods limit the user experience and get severer when a large number of gestures are required. To address the problem, this paper presents a novel human-3DTV interaction system based on a set of simple free-hand gestures for direct-touch interaction with a virtual interface to facilitate human-3DTV interaction. Specifically, our system projects a virtual interface in front of the user who wears the 3D shutter glass, and the user just stretches the arm and touches the virtual interface like performing on a smart phone with a touch screen, using gestures such as Click, Slide, Hold, Drag and Zoom In/Out. Our system is able to recognize the user's gesture fast and accurately, as the system only needs to search for a small region neighboring the virtual interface for a small set of gesture types. Because we adopt the key gestures using on smart phones, our free-hand gestures can be easily used by anyone with only a brief training. The users feel more comfortable than traditional gesture input methods and can effectively interact with 3DTV using our system. We report a comprehensive user study on accuracy and speed to validate the advantages of the proposed human-3DTV interaction system.