A Comparison of Surface and Motion User-Defined Gestures for Mobile Augmented Reality

Advancements in Augmented Reality (AR) technologies and processing power of mobile devices have created a surge in the number of mobile AR applications. Nevertheless, many AR applications have adopted surface gestures as the default method for interaction with virtual content. In this paper, we investigate two gesture modalities, surface and motion, for operating mobile AR applications. In order to identify optimal gestures for various interactions, we conducted an elicitation study with 21 participants for 12 tasks, which yielded a total of 504 gestures. We classified and illustrated the two sets of gestures, and compared them in terms of goodness, ease of use, and engagement. The elicitation process yielded two separate sets of user-defined gestures; legacy surface gestures, which were familiar and easy to use by the participants, and motion gestures, which had better engagement. From the interaction patterns of this second set of gestures, we propose a new interaction class called TMR (Touch-Move-Release), which defines for mobile AR.