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

• Title: User-Defined Motion Gestures for Mobile Interaction
• Reference Information:
• Jaime Ruiz, Yang Li, and Edward Lank. 2011. User-defined motion gestures for mobile interaction.  In <em>Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems</em> (CHI '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA,  197-206. DOI=10.1145/1978942.1978971 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1978942.1978971
  
• UIST 2010 New York, New York.
• Author Bios:
• Jaime Ruiz is a fifth-year doctoral student at the University of Waterloo.  Ruiz plans to graduate in December 2011.
• Yang Li received his Ph.D. from the Chinese Academy of Sciences which he followed up with postdoctoral research at the University of California at Berkeley. Li helped found the Design Use Build community while a professor at the University of Washington before becoming a Senior Research Scientist at Google.
• Edward Lank is an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo.  Lank received his Ph.D. in 2001 from Queen's University. 
• Summary
• Hypothesis:
• Researchers hypothesized that actions can be performed efficiently on a mobile device by utilizing 3D gestures recognized by sensors located on the device such as an accelerometer. 
• Methods
• The researchers designed an experiment to allow users to freely create their own gestures.  The screen on the phone was locked so that it wouldn't display any feedback to the users.  The participants were presented with sets of tasks and were asked to design an easy to use and remember gesture for each of them, and were not required to commit until all of them had been designed.
• Results
• The data collected was then analyzed which resulted in some classifications.  When mapping the gestures they were classified into four dimensions of the nature of the action: metaphor, physical, symbolic or abstract.  Other classification descriptions were developed which resulted in a gesture taxonomy.  
• Contents
•  Researchers hope that this taxonomy will aid in the creation of gesture interactions for phones in the future.  The researchers are unclear whether these gestures will be used in a generic fashion, with multiple applications supporting similar motions, or whether developers will use these to create their own arbitrary gestures for different applications. The hope is that representative motions will be utilized for similar functionality.
• Discussion
• The researchers seem to have presented a proposal for new navigational techniques which may be used in future generations of mobile devices.  The researchers proposed further research to investigate gesture delimiting techniques, so that fluid interactions can be achieved when performing tasks.  I believe this paper was also accepted to the same conference and would be an interesting read to determine the feasibility of this idea.



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