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

Paper Title: Gesture Avatar: A Technique for Operating Mobile User Interfaces Using Gestures

Authors: Hao Lu and Yang Li

Author Bios:

Hao Lu: 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 Science.

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. 

Presentation Venue: CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems that took place at New York (ACM)

Summary:
Hypothesis: Gesture Avatar can provide a useful, viable solution to the problem of imprecise finger input on touch-screen surfaces. The paper also presents three separate hypothesis regarding GA's relation to Shift: 1) "H1" Gesture Avatar will be slower than Shift on larger targets, but faster on small targets

2) "H2" Gesture Avatar will have fewer errors than Shift, 3) "H3" Mobile Situations such as walking will decrease the time performance and increase the error rate of Shiftm but have little influence on Gesture Avatar.

How the hypothesis was tested: Participants were asked to test both Shift and Gesture Avatar, with half of the group starting on one technology and the other half starting with the other. Participants were also asked to complete tasks both sitting and walking. To begin with, they were asked to select different targets of varying size, complexity, and ambiguity. Also, the performance time was measured between the lap of the start target and the selection of the final target. The researchers aimed to address both letter ambiguity and commonness by using 24 different letters and controlling the distance between the objects and the number of letters used.

Results: This paper presents and explores Gesture Avatar, an application designed to combat the issue of impression from finger-based touch screen technology. The authors developed their product on an Android phone and tested it against the current Shift technology to better understand where it was limited and where it excelled. Overall, their results matched their hypothesis and the product itself received a positive reception from test subjects.

Discussion:

Effectiveness: I think the researchers did a very good job of testing and presenting this project. I am glad to see that there is significant strides being taken in this area of precision as it is a prevalent issue among touch-screens today.