Reading #3: "Those Look Similar!" Issues in Automating Gesture Design Advice (2001)

by Long, Landay, and Rowe

Comments: Sam

This paper presents the quill gesture design tool that is aimed at helping developers create pen gesture-based interfaces. The quill software gives advice to the developers if multiple gestures might be ambiguous to the computer or visually similar to people.

The authors conducted some experiments to determine what kinds of gestures are perceived as similar by people by having a few hundred participants judge a large number of gestures and pick the most complex ones. They then developed an algorithm for predicting gesture similarity.

Interface designers use quill to input gestures for their interfaces. quill uses the similarity algorithm and Rubine's methods to give feedback to the users and train and recognize the gestures. The paper talks in detail about challenges related to giving advice such as how, when, and where advice is displayed in addition to what advice is displayed.

The authors conclude that the quill system, while it could use many refinements and improvements, is a good start and can possible inspire other advice-giving systems for gesture-based interfaces.

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I can appreciate the assistance given to developers relating to gesture definitions. There still are not many systems that can do this, especially with 3D hand gestures. I have run into issues in my own research where two gestures I didn't think were similar actually were, and it can be a pain to re-define gestures, especially if you discover the similarity after a large gesture set has been defined, which can make it difficult to think of a new unique gesture. I would really appreciate more development of these tools for 2D and 3D gestures.

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