Evaluation of Pointing Strategies for Microsoft Kinect Sensor Device

Supervisors: Denis Lalanne, Matthias Schwaller

Student: Daria Nitescu

Project status: Finished

Year: 2012

In this final master project, I investigate different strategies for pointing and selecting from a distance using only the human hand, by being tracked by the Microsoft Kinect Sensor Device for Xbox 360. The implemented system provides a hand-free interaction on a gesture based interface. The user interaction on the graphical interface consists in the action of “point and click” on a fixed number of targets.

This report describes the Kinect technology and its applications, as well as the available software development tools. I present different selection strategies that allow the user to perform freehand gestures to accomplish a task. The project introduces two selection strategies, the temporal one and the dart one. The temporal strategy takes into consideration the time parameter, while the dart strategy considers the distance parameter. Then I introduce the visual feedback strategies developed in my project, which are based of geometrical figures and colors, with the goal to show the user how the system recognizes the pointing and selections. In order to achieve the desired user interaction, I developed the system in Linux OS, using the OpenNI framework and NITE middleware, Eclipse platform and C++ programming language. Five performance strategies were implemented considering the time and the distance parameter. Only three strategies were tested with real users with a defined selection of targets stored in the configuration files.

In the end of the project, I provide an evaluation on performance of the implemented pointing strategies using the Fitts’s Law. A detailed statistical evaluation is presented for the three tested strategies, using an ANOVA test. The calculated index of performance shows that the Hand to Kinect Relative Distance (2) strategy has the best performance. The higher the index of performance, the better is the strategy. The ANOVA test confirms that the Hand to Kinect Relative Distance (2) is statistically better than the other two strategies.

Document: report.pdf