Nomadic gestures: A technique for reusing gesture commands for frequent ambient interactions

Abstract

The age of ambient intelligence has already incorporated gestures into practical applications with the goal of delivering adaptive and personalized interactions. However, practitioners are faced with many problems when implementing gesture-based interfaces for such interactive ambient systems. Although gestures offer great opportunity for natural and intuitive interactions, there are currently little to no rules for creating the set of gestures for a given application. Therefore, designers associate gestures and functions by relying only on their own expertize and experience which leads to different systems exposing different standards. This approach does not only create the premises for confusion among users in a future world with such hundreds daily interactions but it also contradicts the goals of ambient intelligence in which interaction should be personalized and adapted to each user. This work introduces a novel concept (nomadic gestures) for reusing a set of user-defined gesture commands in the context of interacting with ambient systems. Nomadic gestures live on each user's personal mobile device and are uploaded to the ambient system prior to interaction. The concept relies on an important shift of perspective strictly adhering to the goals of ambient intelligence: it is not the users that adapt to the interface learning its commands but instead the interface employs the users' own gesture sets with their own preferred function associations.