Paper Reading #24: Gesture Avatar: A Technique for Operating Mobile User Interfaces Using Gestures

Reference Information
Gesture Avatar: A Technique for Operating Mobile User Interfaces Using Gestures
Hao Lu, Yang Li
Presented at CHI 2011, May 7-12, 2011, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Author Bios

• Hao Lu is a graduate student in the University of Washington's Computer Science and Engineering Department and DUB Group. He is interested in new interaction methods.
• Yang Li is a senior research scientist at Google and was a research associate at the University of Washington. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is primarily interested in gesture-based interaction, with many of his projects implemented on Android.

Summary
Hypothesis
The researchers propose a system, Gesture Avatar, that recognizes gestures associated with specified GUI widgets and performs the desired function. The hypothesis is that this kind of a system will reduce errors and be preferred by GUI designers that won't have to wast real estate on over sized buttons anymore.

Methods
The walking tasks were performed on a treadmill. All participants used touchscreen phones extensively. A within-subjects factorial user study had half the participants use Shift then Gesture Avatar and then vice versa for the other half. For each technique, the task was performed while sitting and walking. Users were asked to locate a single highlighted target out of 24 small letter boxes. Ambiguity was simluated by controlling the distance between objects and the number of letters used. Finger positions were stabilized.

Results
Gesture Avatar was much slower than Shift when target size was 20px, but faster than shift when target size decreased to 10px.  The two techniques were approximately equal at 15px, and both techniques increased in speed with larger target sizes.  Shift with MobileState was faster when sitting than when walking, but Gesture Avatar was roughly the same between the two activities.

Contents
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 liked that this field is being addressed as an Android phone owner, there is a big problem with selecting certain links on a screen that will still fit in your pocket.