By Tim Lewis, Big Sky Interactive
This June we brought our TouchFree interface to the show floor at InfoComm 2026 in Las Vegas for one reason above all, to let thousands of tech enthusiasts, integrators, AV experts, and lay people use it and watch their reactions.
The InfoComm show floor is the best usability lab possible for a TouchFree User Interface. Thousands of people stream past, no one is trained on it. A perfect test for not only the system, but the affordances we used to take a user from curious to expert in a few seconds.
Over three days I watched a parade of people, techies, laypeople, AV experts, interact with our touchless user interface. Some breezed right through it, some needed a moment to find it, and both taught me something. What they showed me lines up with years of research into how people interact with their hands. Here is what I took home.
The Screen Has to Lead and Follow
Most picked it up instantly, they caught the affordances built in the system, visual cues that communicate to the user how to interact with it. Many compared it with the Apple Vision and Meta Quest VR headsets and video games. These were natives with spatial hand control and got it right away.
The moment someone presented an index finger to control the cursor and they saw the low latency responsiveness and precision, it was always a wow moment. They would smile, and keep exploring.
That running confirmation feedback from the screen is the foundation everything else sits on. We wanted it be a tactile feedback, as if they were moving a mouse, left clicking and hitting a button. A person can see the screen reacting to them instantly, so they know they are in control.
The Science of Feeling in Control
There is a name for that feeling, and a real body of research behind it. Psychologists call it the sense of agency, the feeling that you are the one making something happen.
The biggest challenge making a TouchFree user interface feel natural is to build a sense of control. We did that by getting the latency down to 15 ms, so when you move your index finger use instantly feel the cursor react. The way a fine instrument becomes an extension of a musician’s hands. When the feeling of control is right, people stop thinking about the hand movement and start thinking about what they came to do.
People already know how to do this
My favorite moment at the booth, again and again, was watching someone point to click the air the very first. They do it because they have pointed at things their entire lives. The instinct already lives in their hands.
Good touchless design hands them an interface that delivers control without thinking about it. That is exactly where the interesting work lives, and it is where Big Sky Interactive has spent its time.
Where this is going
The touchless interfaces that becomes the standard will feel like a good conversation. The person reaches out, the screen answers, and instantly feel the control like second nature. That is the bar we design to, and 30,000 people in Las Vegas told us we are on the right path.
Thank you InfoComm 2026 and everyone who stopped by the Big Sky Interactive TouchFree booth!
Tim Lewis runs Big Sky Interactive, which builds computer-vision touchless interfaces for public spaces.