Effects of Computer Aided Design Modeling System with Hand Gesture and Eye Tracking Interface

As the core tool of industrial product design, computer aided design (CAD) software mainly adopts the traditional mouse and keyboard (MK) interface, which limits the naturalness and intuitiveness of the CAD modeling process. Recently, the emerging multimodal interface combined with hand gesture and eye tracking (HE), provides a natural and efficient interaction method. The use of this novel interface for CAD modeling has become an important development trend. This study aims to analyze the effects on user performance in a practical application where an experimental comparison between HE and traditional MK interfaces is set based on a CAD modeling system. With this prototype HE interface system for CAD modeling, users are able to complete drawing, moving, zooming, rotating of models by hand gesture and selecting of target models by eye tracking. To assess the practical efficacy of HE interface in CAD modeling, a user experiment was conducted involving 16 participants. They were tasked with performing specific CAD commands, including model drawing, selecting, moving, zooming and rotating. Each of them needed to use both interfaces (i.e., HE and MK interfaces) separately to complete specific modeling tasks. Metrics recorded included task operation time, accuracy and user preference. The results indicate that HE interface reduces operation time compared to the traditional MK. For instance, the average operation time is almost reduced by more than 10% with a corresponding increase in operation efficiency. However, average operation accuracy is slightly compromised with a decrease less than 1% in precision when using the HE interface.