Summary
The authors introduce Whack Gestures in order for people to interact with devices with minimal attention and without taking the device out. They introduced a small vocabulary of gestures intended to interact with a small mobile device. To counter the possibility of false positives, the user must use a pair of whacks to frame the gesture to be recognized. There were 3 different gestures: whack-whack, whack-whack-whack, and whack-wiggle-whack.
They used a Mobile Sensor Platform, which is small enough to be attached to the waist. They tested their system with 11 users. They wore it for 2 hours each and then performed the 3 gestures 3 times each. The results from the test was a 97% true positive rate.
Discussion
I think this is an interesting way to solve the problem of interacting with a device without taking it out. However, whacking the device may not be silent enough. I wonder if the device is sensitive to tapping. It seems that if the point of this was to interact silently, tapping would be more silent than whacking.
Scott E. Hudson, Chris Harrison, Beverly Harrison, Anthony LaMarca. Whack Gestures: Inexact and Inattentive Interaction with Mobile Devices. TEI 2010.
Actually, it would be entertaining to watch people randomly whacking their phones on the street. Or maybe not.
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