Touchless interfaces for public displays: Can we deliver interface designers from introducing artificial push button gestures?

Public displays have lately become ubiquitous thanks to the decreasing cost of such technology and public policies supporting the development of smart cities. Depending on form factor, those displays might use touchless gestural interfaces that therefore are becoming more often the subject of public and private research. In this paper, we focus on touchless interactions with situated public displays, and introduce a pilot study on comparing two interfaces: An interface based on the Microsoft Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), a de facto standard in the field, and a novel interface, designed by us. Differently from the HIG-based one, our interface displays an avatar, which does not require any activation gestures to trigger actions. Our aim is to study how the two interfaces address the so-called interaction blindness - the inability of the users to recognize the interactive capabilities of those displays. According to our pilot study, although providing a different approach, both interfaces has proven effective in the proposed scenario: A public display in a hall inside a University campus building.