“Those Look Similar!” Issues in Automating Gesture Design Advice

"Those Look Similar!" Issues in Automating Gesture Design Advice

Howdy!!!

                In this blog post, I'd like to talk about the above mentioned paper briefly and express my views and opinions on it. 

                The authors of the above mentioned paper designed and implemented a system that recognizes gestures that are similar to one another with respect to human perception and/ or gesture recognition algorithms. Based on that information, it gives advice as to how the gestures can modified so that they may not cause confusion. A lot of novel techniques for human- computer interaction like pen- based gesture recognition, human- body movement based gesture recognition and many others are getting common nowadays and they are very useful because they're quick and easy to remember than text- based commands. It'd be very convenient if the interface designers could integrate those techniques in the design of their interfaces but unfortunately, not a lot of designers have access to tools that can help them with this purpose. Also, sometimes the gestures created can be very similar and the gesture- recognition algorithm might not be able to detect differences between different gesture classes. 

           The authors developed a system quill which is a tool for designing gesture- based interfaces based on Rubine algorithm for gesture- recognition. It also provides advice when two gesture classes are similar. The designer can store templates for each gesture forming a gesture- class. There can be several gesture- classes which can be combined to form a gesture- group. The gesture- group and gesture- classes form the gesture- set. Each gesture class normally has about 10- 15 examples of the gesture.

Figure 1

         Whenever the designer is creating a new gesture- class, the program runs a background analysis to determine if the gesture would be confusing to the user or be perceived as similar to some other gesture. It warns the user and provides an explanation and advice on how to modify it to make it more distinguishable. 

In my opinion, it is a very good tool as it makes the creation of gesture- based interfaces easier and also makes sure that the gestures created will have very unique characteristics for the purposes of distinguishing between different gestures. It can be improved to get more accurate results and extend support for hand- gestures and other kinds of gestures.

I used the following sources for this blog post:

[1] Proceeding PUI '01. Proceedings of the 2001 workshop on Perceptive user interfaces. Pages 1-5. ACM New York, NY, USA ©2001

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