Take a Seat, Make a Gesture: Charting User Preferences for On-Chair and From-Chair Gesture Input

We explore the chair as a referential frame for facilitating hand gesture input to control interactive systems. First, we conduct a Systematic Literature Review on the topic of interactions supported by chairs, and uncover little research on harnessing everyday chairs for input, limited to chair rotation and tilting movements. Subsequently, to understand end users’ preferences for gestures performed on the chair’s surface (i.e., on-chair gestures) and in the space around the chair (i.e., from-chair gestures), we conduct an elicitation study involving 54 participants, 3 widespread chair variations—armchair, office-chair, and stool,—and 15 referents encompassing common actions, digital content types, and navigation commands for interactive systems. Our findings reveal a preference for unimanual gestures implemented with strokes, hand poses, and touch input, with specific nuances and kinematic profiles according to the chair type. Based on our findings, we propose a range of implications for interactive systems leveraging on-chair and from-chair gestures.