Work in progress paper.
We use a Wizard-of-Oz design to investigate the effects of physical context on the social acceptability of touchless (3D) gesture interaction for pairs of mature users (age 30+) controlling a sound system in a living room environment. As part of this, we also investigate how the production of the gesture set varies with respect to physical context. Participants took turns being host (user) and guest (observer) in two conditions: “easy” and “hard”. We find a tendency for social acceptability to be higher for the “easy” setup compared to “hard” and for hosts to rate the experience higher than guests. We also find a tendency for gesture size to decrease across sessions, though gestures in the “hard” setup tend to be larger than those in the “easy” setup.