Pointing, Pairing and Grouping Gesture Recognition in Virtual Reality

During a team discussion, participants frequently perform pointing, pairing, or grouping gestures on artifacts on a whiteboard. While the content of the whiteboard is accessible to the blind and visually impaired people, the referring deictic gestures are not. This paper thus introduces an improved algorithm to detect such gestures and to classify them. Since deictic gestures such as pointing, pairing and grouping are performed by sighted users only, we used a VR environment for the development of the gesture recognition algorithm and for the subsequent user studies.