Children and intuitiveness of interaction:A study on gesture-based interaction with augmented reality

This paper describes a user study with an aim to explore intuitiveness of gestures-based interaction in an augmented reality (AR) application. We selected children of age 10-11 as the target group in order to address the research problem in a setting where users have as little as possible experience on prior related technologies or ways of interaction. Altogether 22 children were using a hand-held web camera-based AR interface, and tried to identify ways of controlling the AR view through moving and performing gestures with the web cam. The results indicated interesting contradictions. Although the overall evaluations of the application seemed positive, the observations showed that the children could not identify the gestural input affordances when they had to focus on maintaining the marker-based AR-view with the same hand and modality as with they were expected to create gestural input. In addition to the findings related to the intuitiveness, we contemplate the research setting of having children as participants of user testin