Intention prediction approach to interact naturally with the microworld

Micromanipulation tools are not yet commonly used in the industry or in the research due to the lack of natural and intuitive human-computer interfaces. This work proposes a vision based approach using a Kinect RGB-Depth sensor to provide a “metaphor-free” interface. An intention prediction approach is proposed, based on a cognitive science computational model, to allow a more natural interaction without any prior instructions. This model is compared to a vision based gesture recognition approach in terms of naturalness and intuitiveness. It shows an improvement in user performance in terms of duration and success of the task, and a qualitative preference for the proposed approach evaluated by a user survey.