Comparing a Mid-Air Two-Hand Pinching Point-and-Click Technique with Mouse, Keyboard and TouchFree

Some of our daily activities are performed by interacting with public touchscreens, such as food kiosks, bank tellers and newsstands. Nonetheless, the physical contact with these screens that are used by different people may be considered unhygienic. To avoid contact, some screens already integrate one-hand contactless interaction technologies, i.e. Leap Motion Controller, though they may lead to arm fatigue and slow performance. We present LeapPointer, a mid-air two-hand pinching point-and-click technique. Specifically, this technique relies on a Leap Motion device to track both hands, and proposes a new software tool that allows bimanual selection through pointing and pinching gestures. A user study was performed to compare LeapPointer with two other techniques: the common mouse/keyboard and the current UltraLeap's TouchFree technique. Task completion time and accuracy as well as subjective data were gathered. The analysis of these data suggested that LeapPointer is significantly faster than the other touchless technique although less accurate. Self-reported fatigue was less with LeapPointer than with TouchFree.