Paper Reading #23: User-defined Motion Gestures for Mobile Interaction

Authors

Jaime Ruiz, Yang Li, Edward Lank

Occupation

Jaime Ruiz is currently a fifth-year doctoral student in the HCI Lab in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.

Yang Li is currently a Senior Research Scientist working for Google.  He spent time at the University of Washington as a research associate in computer science and engineering.  He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Edward Lank holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Queen's University.  He is currently  an Assistant Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo

Location

 Published in the CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems at NYC

Summary

Hypothesis

Even though smart phones these days have sensors to detect 3D motion, there is a need for better understanding of practices in motion gesture design.

Methods

twenty participants were asked to perform motion gestures with a smartphone that can be used to execute a task on the phone. These gestures were taken, analyzed and some of them were used for the rest of the study. The participants were then given a set of tasks and a set of gestures. The participants were to perform the gesture and rate them based on how well it matched and how easy it was to perform

Results

the gestures designed by the participants tended to be normal and intuitiveness. (see pictures on bottom for examples) A lot of the gestures tended to mimic a interaction as if doing so with a real physical object as well. Tasks considered opposites usually results in gestures that were quite similar.

Content

The paper focused on various ways to map 3D gestures with a mobile device effectively by making them easy to use and intuitive for the user. Results and procedure was mostly consistent. The paper also discusses the various aspects that the users manipulated during the experiment. Based on the experiment the authors classified 3D mapping with 2 aspects: gesture mapping and physical characteristics.

Discussion

The paper was quite interesting as i looked at it as something that can be really applied in today's world to make things easier. Especially since a lot of people have smart phones these days. I think that this research will provide better understandings in terms of how we can apply our current technology in a better way by looking at user behavior and thinking