Effects of Auditory Feedback on Menu Selection in Hand-Gesture Interfaces

With the increasing amount of new motion-sensing hardware, improving the usability of gesture interfaces is becoming more important. However, people don´t accept gesture interfaces as comfortably as traditional interfaces because they lack the tactile or haptic feedback of traditional input methods, such as mice or keyboards. However, having tactile feedback in gesture interfaces isn´t possible unless users are wearing a device with actuators. Therefore, auditory feedback is an appropriate and unique alternative for assisting visual feedback in gesture interfaces. The authors propose various types of novel auditory feedback methods and explore their effects as secondary feedback on complementing visual feedback. They performed a user study for a menu selection task, and experimental results show that the proposed auditory feedback is significantly more efficient and effective than visual-only feedback or conventional auditory feedback in terms of time and accuracy.