Abstract: The shape or movement of a gesturing body or portion thereof in two- or three-dimensional space is ascertained from the path of the outline of the shape or the path of the movement. The method disclosed involves receiving input of data that represents a path and using artificial intelligence to recognize the meaning of the path, i.e., to recognize which of a plurality of pre-prepared meanings is the meaning of a gesture. As pre-processing for inputting location data for a point group along the path to the artificial intelligence, at least one attribute from among the location, size, and direction of the entire point group is extracted, and location data for the point group is converted to attribute invariant location data that is relative to the extracted attribute(s) but not dependent on the extracted attribute(s). Then data that includes the attribute invariant location data and the extracted attribute(s) is inputted to the artificial intelligence as input data.