Hand Gestures in Extended Reality

Sammanfattning

Gestures are usual companions to the words we speak, either enhancing them or simply accompanying them. Multiple studies focus on the relationship between gestures and speech, and even how they might affect who is listening. In more recent times, the field of investigation expanded to include insights into human behaviour in virtual contexts, making the most of the headsets worn by the users to, in particular, gather tracking data to study the gestures produced. The purpose of this research is to observe whether having interactions in a virtual environment affects the way people present themselves and the gestures they make. By implementing different virtual representations of the hands, the aim is to analyse the participants’ behaviour and check if it is affected by these conditions. Through the use of the Meta Quest Pro headset and the creation of a virtual platform to test the participants, a variety of data regarding the position of their hands (and their joints) and their gaze direction was collected. It was then inferred that the chosen device was a reliable instrument due to the low tracking failure rate, associated to the hands moving in areas more critical to catch. According to the analysed data, the participants looked at their hands less frequently than they looked at the person they were talking to, which was in line with the results obtained by other researchers in non-digital contexts; this also meant that having a hand shape that was not realistic did not reflect any relevant change.