Studying Children’s Manipulative Gestures in Spatial Puzzle Play with VR Hand Tracking: Analysis of Goal-directed Actions

This paper presents insights about children’s manipulative gestures in a spatial puzzle play (i.e. tangram) in both real and virtual environments. We present our initial work with 11 children (aged between 7 and 14) and preliminary results based on a qualitative analysis of children’s goal-directed actions as one dimension of gestural input. Based on our early results, we list a set of goal-directed actions as a first stage for developing a manipulative gestural taxonomy. For a more comprehensive view, we suggest a further in-depth investigation of these actions combined with hand and finger kinematics, and outline a number of paths for future research.