User-Defined Gesture Interactions for VR Museums: An Elicitation Study

Recognizing the potential of freehand gestures for interacting with virtual objects in virtual environments, our research introduces a user-defined freehand gesture set of typical referents in virtual reality (VR), focusing on a specific scenario: VR museums. We conducted a comprehensive elicitation study with two experiments to define and refine the gesture set. Meanwhile, we demonstrated an enhanced real-time Wizard of Oz approach that facilitated users’ understanding of referents in VR and their gesture design. Our findings revealed significant improvements in gesture consistency and user agreement through two experiments, with an average agreement score of firstchoice and second-choice advancing from 0.211 and 0.160 to 0.412 and 0.284, respectively. By offering a consistent user-centered gesture set, this work contributes to guiding museum curators toward creating more immersive user experiences in VR museums. The gestures can also be extended to other VR applications that necessitate travel, selection and manipulation, and system control tasks.