Paper Reading #24: Gesture avatar: a technique for operating mobile user interfaces using gestures

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

Chi '11

By:
Hao Lu and Yang Li.

• Hao Lu is currently a graduate student in CSE at the University of Washington.
• Yang Li has a PhD in Computer Science from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is currently a Senior Research Scientist for Google.

Summary
Hypothesis
Gesture Avtar is meant to resolve the problem of imprecise touch screen input. This paper also compares Gesture Avtar with Shift such as Gesture Avtar's speed with small targets as opposed to large targets, having fewer errors in general and ease of use of Gesture Avtar regardless of use state (walking, sitting, etc).

Methods
Participants were divided into two groups and asked to run a series of tests  on either Gesture Avtar or GA an then later switch. All test were done both while walking and while sitting still. Tests included achieving targets of varying sizes, shapes, ambiguity and complexity. Using the English alphabet and varying the size of the keys and the space between them the researchers were able to thoroughly test and find the best combination to reduce errors.

Results
Gesture Avtar was found lacking at a target size of 20pixels compared to Shift; same at 15pixels and found to be advantageous at 10 pixels. At sizes greater than 20 pixels both Gesture Avtar and Shift became quicker. Shift combined with MobileState performed better in a stationary setting as opposed to in a moving one, while Gesture Avtar was equally quick in both states of use.

Contents
This paper presents Gesture Avtar, an application designed to result in more precise touch screen inputs. This application was developed to work on Android and was pitted against Shift technology to better understand its limitations and areas of improvement. After much testing they concluded that they had met their objective considering the positive reviews from the test subjects.

Discussion
This paper was fantastic and highly relevant considering the massive flux of touch screen based cell phones in the market and fairly high rate of inaccurate  screens amongst them. I feel a polished and complete version of this application would work out extremely well, especially if they were able to build on the user feedback.