PresActive

Overview

PresActive is a web-based application for creating slide presentations, controlled entirely through touchless mid-air hand gestures. It was developed as part of my Master of Science degree at the University of Dundee, investigating how touchless interaction shapes the design, usability, and user acceptance of productivity software.

The project was structured as formal research: a literature review, a gesture mapping study with participants, a custom-built prototype, and a usability evaluation. Each stage fed into the next.

The Research Question

Touchless interaction was gaining ground in public installations, healthcare, and gaming: contexts where hygiene or distance made it useful. Applying it to productivity software raises different questions. When you're editing a presentation rather than navigating a museum exhibit, the stakes for discoverability, precision, and fatigue are higher. What does a touchless interface look like when it needs to support a full set of editing actions, not just a handful of navigation gestures?

Gesture Mapping Study

Before designing the interface, I ran a study in which participants were asked to match application features to a pre-selected set of technically feasible and well-accepted gestures. This produced a data-driven gesture vocabulary (which gestures people intuitively associated with which actions) rather than one invented by the designer.

The study also surfaced tensions. Some gestures with high recognition scores conflicted with each other; others were strongly associated with one action but felt awkward in motion. These findings directly shaped which gestures made it into the prototype and which were ruled out.

Interface Design

The main design challenge was menu access. Touchless interaction makes traditional navigation structures difficult: hover states are unreliable, click targets need to be larger, and menus that require moving through a spatial hierarchy are exhausting. I designed a circular swipe context menu as the primary navigation mechanism: a radial layout that can be invoked from any point and navigated with a single directional swipe. All editing features are reachable within one gesture from the menu, without requiring the user to move their arm to a corner of the screen.

Menu invocation used a dwell-click approach: holding the cursor still for a defined duration triggers the menu. This is a well-known technique in touchless interaction but also a well-known source of frustration: it's slow, and accidental triggers are common. This tension came up clearly in the evaluation.

Prototype and Evaluation

I built a functional web application in HTML, JavaScript, and jQuery, integrating gesture recognition. The prototype supported the core presentation editing workflow: creating slides, adding and editing content, applying formatting.

The usability evaluation with participants measured both task performance and subjective acceptance. Results were overall positive: usability ratings were high, and most participants described the experience as enjoyable. But gorilla-arm syndrome (physical fatigue from extended use of mid-air gestures) appeared after sustained use, and the dwell-click activation mechanism drew consistent criticism for being too slow and imprecise.

Both findings aligned with known open problems in the field, and the evaluation contributed concrete observations about where they manifest in a productivity context.

Outcome

The project confirmed that touchless interfaces can support complex productivity tasks with acceptable usability, but the input modality places real constraints on interaction design that don't apply to mouse or touch. The circular menu approach held up well; the activation mechanism didn't. That tension between discoverability and reliability in dwell-based input is still an unsolved problem in the field.

View research poster