AgentHands: Generating interactive hand gestures for spatially grounded agent conversations in XR

As AI assistants evolve from simple text interfaces to multimodal companions, we are seeing a shift toward more proactive, situated assistance. Recent innovations like Project Astra and Gemini 3.1 Flash Live already allow users to discuss their physical surroundings in real time, often utilizing visual bounding box overlays to identify objects in a camera feed. While these overlays are highly effective for 2D screens, the transition to immersive platforms like Android XR presents a unique challenge: how do we move beyond flat UI to create a truly embodied, spatially aware dialogue?

To bridge this gap, we introduce AgentHands, published at CHI 2026, a research prototype that brings the power of co-speech gestures to the 3D world. In human communication, our hands do more than just point; they describe shapes, mimic actions, and emphasize points, all synchronized with our voice. By leveraging the spatial understanding capabilities of Extended Reality (XR), AgentHands replicates this natural synergy. Following up our prior research in Human I/O and Sensible Agent, AgentHands further equips AI agents with expressive, synchronized hand gestures that transform abstract verbal instructions into intuitive, physical demonstrations, making conversations about your surroundings more natural and engaging.

A taxonomy for embodied hand agents in XR

To start, we conducted a formative study with XR and human–computer interaction (HCI) experts at Google to determine what makes a virtual hand “legible” in a 3D environment. We distilled these insights into a multi-dimensional taxonomy that defines how an agent should use its hands to ground a conversation within a user's physical space.

The AgentHands workflow

The core innovation of AgentHands is its ability to map the high-level reasoning of LLMs into precise, real-time physical motions that match the agent's “voice” and the user's XR environment. We introduce the following key steps to compose the AgentHands workflow.