JollyGesture: Exploring Dual-Purpose Gestures in VR Presentations

Gun Woo Warren Park, Anthony Tang, Fanny Chevalier

Letter Of Changes:

We thank all of the reviewers for their detailed, and helpful reviews of our work. After carefully reviewing all of the reviews, we identified 4 themes of concern, and we revised our manuscript based on this. Following is the summary of changes for each theme:

* [Meta, 64Bk] RQs and the focus of the research are unclear: To address these concerns raised, we have opted for improving the through-line of the manuscript. For example, we updated the introduction (§1) to include concrete research questions, the main focus of our research, and added a summary of the finding (§5) at the end of each finding to make the takeaway message clear.  The concerns also suggested the vagueness on how the gesture brainstorming contributes to the design of JollyGesture, to which we added clarification sentences in §6. We also updated the title to correctly conform with the scope of our research and the focus.
* [dYtH, 64Bk] Correctness concerns: 
* Marking menu: Reviewer dYtH suggested including a comparison of radial menus and control menus to more precisely describe our menu design, but if we wish to reference the marking menu, better references should be included (we cited a thesis, but the reviewer suggested a conference paper). After carefully reviewing all three menus, we decided that the marking menu reflects our design intention the best, so followed the latter suggestion from the reviewer.
* Use of the word "probe": Reviewer 64Bk raised concern that the use of the word "probe" in our technology probe design might be incorrect. We added a clarification on this matter to justify our decision. (summary: our work is not fully exploratory as suggested by the reviewer, but tries to provide formative answers to the concrete research questions. Therefore, it is suitable to use the word "probe".)
* [dYtH] Additional references: Reviewer dYtH provided thorough and useful literature to cite, which we added all in relevant sections. These references were added in §2,3, and 6
* [dYtH, 64Bk] Minor edits:
* Typos and suggestions to improve readability are addressed as per the reviews
* Description through Liam: Reviewer 64Bk raised concerns about the use of a persona in describing the use case scenario of our technology probe, as it might lower generalisability. To address this issue, we rewrote the scenario to include a generic presenter.

We hope the revision described above sufficiently addresses all of the concerns raised by reviewers, and we thank all the reviewers for their effort in writing great reviews.

Keywords: Gestural input, Virtual Reality, Presentation.

Abstract: Virtual reality (VR) offers new opportunities for presenters to use expressive body language to engage their audience. Yet, most VR presentation systems have adopted control mechanisms that mimic those found in face-to-face presentation systems. We explore the use of gestures that have dual-purpose: first, for the audience, a communicative purpose; second, for the presenter, a control purpose to alter content in slides. To support presenters, we provide guidance on what gestures are available and their effects. We realize our design approach in JollyGesture, a VR technology probe that recognizes dual-purpose gestures in a presentation scenario. We evaluate our approach through a design study with 12 participants, where in addition to using JollyGesture to deliver a mock presentation, we asked them to imagine gestures with the same communicative and control purpose, before and after being exposed to our probe. The study revealed several new design avenues valuable for VR presentation system design: expressive and coarse-grained communicative gestures, as well as subtle and hidden gestures intended for system control. Our work suggests that VR presentation systems of the future that embrace expressive body language will face design tensions relating to task loading and authenticity.

Submission Number: 33