Gesture Communication: Collaborative and Participatory Design in a New Type of Digital Communication

Tele-Gesture1) is a tangible user interface(TUI) device that allows a user to physically point to a 3D object in real life and have their gestures play back by a robotic finger that can point to the same object, either at the same time, or at another point in time. To understand the extent of the gestures as new way of digital collaborative communication, collaboration situation and types were experimented as TUI implementations. The design prototype reveals that there is a rich non-verbal component of communication in the form of gesture-clusters and body movements that happen in an digital communication. This result of analysis can contribute to compile relevant contributions to the fields of communication, human behavior, and interaction with high technology through an interpretive social experience.