Natural User Interfaces

Dissertação de Mestrado em Engenharia Informática apresentada à Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de CoimbraThis project’s main subject are Natural User Interfaces. These interfaces’ main purpose is to allow the user to interact with computer systems in a more direct and natural way. The popularization of touch and gesture devices in the last few years has allowed for them to become increasingly common and today we are experiencing a transition of interface paradigms from graphical user interfaces to natural user interfaces. However, these interfaces are still being explored, as well as the possibilities that come with them. Whether or not they succeed as a new interface paradigm will depend on whether they are able to provide the user with a truly natural way of interaction. This project’s main goal was to study new possibilities for these interfaces. This was achieved through the development of two video games (based on common and / or traditional games) that should reveal a new way to play them, reinventing these games for these new type of interfaces. The diversity of the types of game that were chosen incite the study of new possibilities for natural user interfaces. These video games were developed for Leap Motion, a device that enables the creation of natural user interfaces since it allows users to interact with the computer through gesture. The development was made using the Unity 3D game engine and, afterwards, evaluations were made in to determine if the goal to create games that explore natural user interfaces was correctly achieved. The results of these evaluations were, overall, positive in all of the age groups included in the evaluation, but were better in the younger ones. The games were later submitted on Airspace, the Leap Motion’s app store