Usability analysis of a pointing gesture interface

The low cost of vision sensors and the increasing computational power of "off the shelf" computers provide the conditions for the introduction of vision based human computer interaction techniques in the domestic environment. In this paper we are reporting empirical data about the usability of a pointing device based on gesture languages recognized by simple vision techniques. The results show that the users learn quicker to apply the gesture pointing language than the laptop\´s touchpad device in a multidirectional point selection task. We discuss the implication of this finding for an applied context such as managing common windows based operating system.