Temporal and Spatial Aspects of Pointing Gestures
The detailed and profound understanding of the temporal and spatial organisation of human pointing actions is key to enable developers to build applications that successfully incorporate multimodal human computer interaction. Rather than discussing an ideal detection method for manual pointing we will discuss crucial aspects of pointing actions in time and space to develop the right solution for a particular application. One core element of pointing in the temporal domain is the so called dwell-time, the time span that people remain nearly motionless during pointing at objects to express their intention. We also discuss important findings about the spatial characteristics of the target representation for the pointing gesture.The findings foster better understanding of the role of pointing gestures in combination with other modalities and inform developer with substantial knowledge about the temporal-spatial organisation of the pointing gesture.