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GAB
Project presentation
Video demonstration
Related publications

Project presentation

Hands are an important tool for our daily communication with our peers and the world. They allow us to convey information through particular gestures that are either the product of social conventions or personal expressions. Thanks to the sophistication of sensing and computer vision technologies over the past decade, automated hands recognition can now be more easily used and integrated in simple web applications. In a context of digital artworks collections, it means that gestures can now be envisioned as a new browsing tool that goes beyond simple movements to navigate through a 3D digital space.

The project Gestures for Artwork Browsing (GAB) is a web application which proposes to use hand motions as a way to directly query pictorial hand gestures from the past. Based on materials from the digitized collection of the Bibliotheca Hertziana, GAB allows users to record a sequence with the movement of their choice and outputs an animation reproducing that same movement through painted hands. Fostering new research possibilities, the project is a novelty in terms of database browsing, as it does not require an traditional research through metadata, and allows a direct communication with the content of the artworks.

Thereby, the project aims to provide a better understanding of gestures from the Early Modern time in perspective of our contemporaneous perception of hand movements. It also aims to foster new discussions on the use of such tools in the field of art history, what it means in terms of research and learning approaches. The prototype is also a novelty for information retrieval and intend to develop further similar approaches

Video demonstration

Related publications

  • Valentine Bernasconi. 2022. GAB - Gestures for Artworks Browsing. In 27th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI ’22 Companion), March 22–25, 2022, Helsinki, Finland. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3490100.3516470

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