Call to interact: communicating interactivity and affordances for contactless gesture controlled public displays

Interactive public displays are becoming increasingly commonplace. Two important challenges for these displays exist: 1) how interactivity is communicated to the passer-by and 2) once the audience have engaged, how the interactive affordances are communicated. We explore these challenges through the lens of a new emerging interaction modality - contactless mid-air gesture controlled public displays. This paper presents several solutions to the problems above, inspired by the findings existing within the related research on public displays. These solutions are deployed in an in-the-wild setting - a cinema for an 8 week duration - and evaluated through observational and quantitative research. The data forms a set of design guidelines for successfully attracting the passer-by and conveying the affordances of the contactless gestural public displays.