Recall This Gesture? Investigating Gesture Memorability in Extended Reality

Gesture interaction is standard in modern extended reality head-mounted displays, e.g., Microsoft Hololens 2 and Apple Vision Pro. These gestures come from multiple sources, such as elicitation studies, the application designer, or an expert. However, it is unclear if the source of the gesture affects the memorability of gestures (i.e., level of recall). In a user study, 35 participants used the HoloLens 2 to test three gestures set from different sources: 1) expert-defined, whereby we asked four experts to define gestures; 2) user-defined, whereby each participant defined their gestures; and 3) elicitation-defined, whereby we used gestures proposed by previous work. Our results showed that expert-defined gestures (72.73% recall) were more likely to be remembered than elicitation-defined (59.87% recall) gestures. Further, user-defined gestures (88.75% recall) were the most memorable. These data suggest that the source of gestures has a substantial impact on their memorability.