A Gesture Elicitation Study for Natural and Ergonomic Interactions in Virtual Reality: The Case of User-Defined Gestures in Immersive Entertainment Experiences
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- This study investigates the gestures that users naturally prefer when interacting with virtual elements in immersive virtual reality (VR) entertainment contexts without controllers. A user-defined gesture elicitation approach was applied to collect and analyse 30 participants’ spontaneous hand movements across 19 distinct interaction tasks (e.g., selection, manipulation, social interaction). Participants performed the gestures in a non-interactive VR environment (Meta Quest 3 with hand tracking), and their proposals were evaluated through both objective measures (e.g., thinking time, agreement rate) and subjective ratings (goodness of fit, naturalness, effort, confidence). The results support four hypotheses: users tend to prefer gestures inspired by real-world actions; low-effort gestures are favoured for repetitive interactions; gesture form is adapted to the nature of the task; and continuous gestures are preferred for exploratory tasks, while discrete ones are favoured for selection. These findings contribute to the design of more intuitive, comfortable, and task-aligned gesture-based interfaces for controller-free VR entertainment experiences.