A Comparison of One- and Two-Handed Gesture User Interfaces in Virtual Reality—A Task-Based Approach

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors propose a comparative study of two interactive systems based on one-hand interaction and the other on two-hand one.

The overall quality of the work is high, and the authors' effort is evident. However, some improvement suggestions could be provided.

It is noticeable that the focus of this manuscript is on gestures. However, a gesture is usually an action that involves a time sequence. If I correctly assumed the input type the authors treated, the hand positions are static; thus, we are discussing poses. I suggest the authors completely restyle the work to use "pose" instead of "gesture" term (or at least introduce this concept more deeply than on line 219)

The methodology by which the authors retrieve the pose of the hand is not totally clear. Is it possible to highlight the technology (algorithm) that focuses on this explanation?

There is an excellent formal explanation of the objective differences between the two methods. However, the subjective results are quite reductive instead. As specified on lines 338 and 339, some tests are inconsistent for this task. However, more tasks could be involved, such as the System Usability Scale (SUS) (Manzollino, R.; Malatesta, S.G.; Avola, D.; Cinque, L.; Del Bove, A.; Leopardi, L.; Marini, M.R. Enhancement and Communication of Ancient Human Remains through VR: The Case Study of Sexual Dimorphism in the Human Skull. Heritage 2023, 6, 4120-4133. https://doi.org/10.3390/heritage6050217) or other similar ones. We suggest introducing at least one of them to provide a complete overview of the effectiveness of the two methods.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

There are no evident mistakes; however, the writing style seems quite unfluent. There are margins of improvement. Moreover, numerous terms are UK instead of USA based, which are uncommon in scientific papers (e.g., utilised instead of utilized). We suggest a complete revision from a mother tongue.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

1. Provide more details on the demographics of your participant group. How might the results differ with a more varied sample in terms of age, gender, and VR experience?

2. Expand your discussion on VR sickness. Detail its implications for long-term use of these interfaces in industrial settings. How did you measure VR sickness among participants? Did you use any standardized questionnaires or scales?

3. Were the tasks designed to represent a range of complexities? How might task complexity affect user preference for one-handed or two-handed interfaces?

4. What were the specific design principles or considerations behind the one-handed and two-handed interfaces? How do these align with ergonomic and usability standards?

5. Based on your findings, what future research directions do you suggest? Are there any practical limitations? Are there any other contexts or user groups where these interfaces could be tested?

 

6. Considering the extensive length of the manuscript, I suggest relocating less critical, detailed sections to appendices to enhance readability and maintain a focused narrative in the main text.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I still believe that the manuscript is too extensive, please consider summarizing some parts or adding an appendix section.

 

Author Response

Thank you for the additional comment, we have provided a change below.

Comment: "I still believe that the manuscript is too extensive, please consider summarizing some parts or adding an appendix section."

Response: We have made the decision to move parts of the individual task-based results and definitions from the Results-section into an appendix. This decision was made after we realized that maybe most of those results are not central, or are already mentioned in other parts of the main text. So the change is that sections 5.1.1 to 5.1.11 from pages 16-24 have been moved to the appendix titled: "Detailed task descriptions and task-based results". We only left the task completion time comparison (5.1.12), as that is an essential result, and the combined task results (5.1.13) sections to the Results based on task performance -section (5.1). We hope that this change enhances the readability of our article, as now the total main text is only 28 pages, although we would still recommend the reader to also read the appendix.