Paper Reading #24: Gesture avatar: a technique for operating mobile user interfaces using gestures

Authors

Yang Li, Hao Lu

Occupation

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.

Hao Lu is currently a graduate student at University of Washington in Computer Science and Engineering.  He is also a member of the DUB Group.  

Location

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

Summary

Hypothesis

Gesture Avatar can be a useful and viable solution to solve the problem of imprecise finger input for touch screen surface

The hypothesis were broken down into several smaller components in regards to GA's relationship with shift:

-GA will be slower than shift on large targets but faster on small

-GA will have fewer errors than shift

-mobile situations will decrease performance of shift but have little influence on GA

Methods

Participants tested both shift and GA.The participants were split in half and each half started out by using the other application first. The tasks were given out and were to be done both while sitting and walking. Examples of tasks include selecting different targets of different sizes, etc. The performance time was measured and recorded. The researched focused on ambiguity and commonness using 24 different letters and manipulating the distance between the various objects.

Results

The GA was slower than shift when size was twenty pixels but faster when size was ten pixels. They were mostly the same at fifteen pixels. As expected with the hypothesis walking impacted the shift noticeably but the impact on GA was very minimal

Content

The paper focuses on this application called Gesture Avatar which is used to increase the accuracy by dealing with imprecise finger based touch screen. The product was used on an Android and tested with the shift technology to see how applicable it was. The results mostly matched with hypothesis and the users were quite pleased with how the application was done

Discussion

I thought that this application is a interesting way of solving the problem and i think it would be very useful when walking around. However, i feel like most people would rather choose to zoom in to click on buttons when they feel the icons are too small. Also tools that allow for better precision when walking around is a dangerous distraction in my opinion as it helps promote more accidents to occur. Especially on campus where there are lots of people, bikes, and cars.