Eliciting User-Defined Touch and Mid-air Gestures for Co-located Mobile Gaming

Abstract

Many interaction techniques have been developed to best support mobile gaming – but developed gestures and techniques might not always match user behaviour or preferences. To inform this design space of gesture input for co-located mobile gaming, we present insights from a gesture elicitation user study for touch and mid-air input, specifically focusing on board and card games due to the materiality of game artefacts and rich interaction between players. We obtained touch and mid-air gesture proposals for 11 game tasks with 12 dyads and gained insights into user preferences. We contribute our classification and analysis of 622 elicited gestures (showing more collaborative gestures in the mid-air modality), resulting in a consensus gesture set, and agreement rates showing higher consensus for touch gestures. Furthermore, we identified interaction patterns – such as benefits of situational awareness, social etiquette, gestures fostering interaction between players, and roles of gestures providing fun, excitement, and suspense to the game – which can inform future games and gesture design.