A Kinect-based system to enable interaction by pointing in smart spaces

Resumen

Pointing is a universal gesture that naturally expresses interest or attraction towards the pointed items. If some ‘magic’ is added, the gesture may also make these items perform actions. In this paper, we describe a system that enables to interact by pointing with digital or physical controllable resources distributed in a smart space. The system facilitates building an interactive room using COTS devices, in particular a pair of Kinect sensors. The pointing direction is inferred from the user’s elbow-wrist vector, which together with a secondary elbow-object vector serves to filter the controllable objects in the area of pointing. Experiments with 8 users in a real setting demonstrate the feasibility of the concept and show that the accuracy of the system is very dependent on the relative position user-resource and on the user behaviour itself.