User-Defined Gestures for Tangible Interaction with Cubes for Smart Home Control

The cube is an object often used for tangible interaction across many fields of application, notably by manipulating cubes or performing gestures with or on them. Although some system- or designer-defined gestures exist for tangible cubes, user-defined gestures for them remain unexplored. To bridge this gap, we conducted three protocol on a different sample of 30 participants proposing a gesture for 13, 16, and 20 referents controlling a smart home appliance, respectively. Based on the total of 1,440 gesture proposals, we established a classification of user-defined gestures for designing tangible interaction with cubes in smart home control structured into seven major categories, which are further broken down into 55 subcategories. This classification is abstracted from properties such as the number of fingers and hands used to manipulate a cube, the repetition of gestures, their combination, and the time of articulation. A Poisson law estimates the number of participants to be recruited to obtain a desired number of gesture categories.

Affiliations

UCLouvainSSH/LouRIM - Louvain Research Institute in Management and Organizations

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Latreche, N., Schiettecatte, B., Roselli, P., Attygalle, N., & Vanderdonckt, J. (2026). User-Defined Gestures for Tangible Interaction with Cubes for Smart Home Control. In Clement Zheng, Daisy Yoo, Tony Tang (ed.), Proceedings of DIS 2026. Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3800645.3813062