Blog #24- Gesture avatar: a technique for operating mobile user interfaces using gestures

Gesture Avatar: a technique for operating mobile user interfaces using gestures

Authors:
Hao Lu  and Yang Li

Author Bios:

• Hao Lu- graduate student at University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering and DUB Group. I work on technologies that change and improve the way how people interact with computers.

• Yang Li-  Senior Research Scientist at Google. Before joining Google's research team, Yang was a Research Associate in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington 

Presented at CHI 2011, May 7-12, 2011, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

SUMMARY: 

Hypothesis:
Finger-based touch input has become a major interaction modality for mobile user interfaces. The researchers of the paper think, if using gesture methods to operate mobile interfaces performs optimally over finger-based touch input, then in a dynamic mobile environment, they believe it will prevail.

Methods:
Touchscreen mobile devices struggle with low precision due to the size of fingers and covering up the target. Increasing the size of widgets is not always feasible. The authors developed Gesture Avatar, which combines the visibility of traditional GUIs and the casual interaction of gestures.Using the Gesture Avatar, the user can create user defined gestures that the program will know, and interact with the programs accordingly to the user.

To test the program they had participants walk on a treadmill. The participants were split in half, and some used Shift (an alternative technique for target acquisition tasks) then used  Gesture Avatar, and then vice versa for the other group. For each technique, the task was performed while sitting and walking.

Results:
The user study conducted showed that compared to Shift , Gesture Avatar performed at a much lower error rate on various target sizes and significantly faster on small targets (1mm). 

Conclusion: 
The researchers of the paper concluded there hypothesis and found that the Avatar gesture system that they created out performed preexisting tools. Their user test were comprehensive in the range of variables,and Gesture Avatar performs better than Shift in a number of ways displayed in the paper.

Discussion:
With the cell phone generation becoming more complex every year, and new models of phones coming out onto the market. I hope that one day, phones will me more precise to what the user wants to press. So a Program like Gesture Avatar, may actually be that stepping stone to which navigating on a cell phone screen will be easier then ever before.