ABSTRACT
Hand and body gestures are an important component of interpersonal communication. Gesture-based control seeks to exploit this channel for human-machine communication (Baudel and Beaudoin-Lafon 1993). Most currently available input devices only make use of discrete pieces of data produced by an operator’s movements. This sometimes stems from the use of intrinsically discrete devices, such as a keyboard or numeric keypad. Even with continuous input devices, such as mice, only specific events and data points (e.g. the coordinates of the pointer when the operator clicks) are taken into account by most applications (Bryson and Levit 1992). Gesture-based interaction attempts to take advantage of the continuity and dynamics of an operator’s movements, instead of extracting only discrete information from these movements (Brooks et al. 1990). Although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, gesture formally refers to dynamic hand or body signs, while posturere refers to static positions or poses.
