Predicting mid-air gestural interaction with public displays based on audience behaviour

•A 35-days long field study focused on a public display deployment.•Results show that audience size and behaviour significantly influence user(s) interactions.•Predictor models are built to forecast users’ interaction duration and distance.•A visualisation tool is made available to visualise predictions based on audience bahaviour.•Both the visualisation tool and the predictor model can be adapted to other deployments.