RIDS: Implicit Detection of a Selection Gesture Using Hand Motion Dynamics During Freehand Pointing in Virtual Reality

Freehand interactions with augmented and virtual reality are growing in popularity, but they lack reliability and robustness. Implicit behavior from users, such as hand or gaze movements, might provide additional signals to improve the reliability of input. In this paper, the primary goal is to improve the detection of a selection gesture in VR during point-and-click interaction. Thus, we propose and investigate the use of information contained within the hand motion dynamics that precede a selection gesture. We built two models that classified if a user is likely to perform a selection gesture at the current moment in time. We collected data during a pointing-and-selection task from 15 participants and trained two models with different architectures, i.e., a logistic regression classifier was trained using predefined hand motion features and a temporal convolutional network (TCN) classifier was trained using raw hand motion data. Leave-one-subject-out cross-validation PR-AUCs of 0.36 and 0.90 were obtained for each model respectively, demonstrating that the models performed well above chance (=0.13). The TCN model was found to improve the precision of a noisy selection gesture by 11.2% without sacrificing recall performance. An initial analysis of the generalizability of the models demonstrated above-chance performance, suggesting that this approach could be scaled to other interaction tasks in the future.