#parsons2014

[voiceandgesture]

tldr; Adults and children in Germany and Ecuador can distinguish between different types of interactions (chasing, playing, fighting, courting) from motion cues (aka mouse movements) alone. Abstract: One of our most fundamental cognitive adaptations is the ability to infer the intentions of others. Whole-body motion is a reliable, valid, easily perceived source of information about intentions because different kinds of intentional action have different motion signatures. In this study, we report four experiments that examined the ability of German adults, German children, and Shuar adults from Amazonian Ecuador to distinguish, on the basis of motion cues alone, between six categories of intentional interaction: chasing, fighting, courting, following, guarding, and playing. Naturalistic motion trajectories were elicited from untutored participants in a game-like situation with performance- based monetary payoffs and were categorized by other participants in a forced-choice design. On a six- category task, German adults correctly categorized intention 75% of the time (where 17% represents chance performance). On a four-category judgment task, children’s performance was above chance by age 4, with a mean of 64% correct. A final study compared the judgments of German adults with those of Shuar hunter-horticulturalists. Performance was identical and well above chance in both populations, suggesting that cognitive adaptations for inferring intention from motion deserve further research as possible universal components of human psychology.

[m-provencher]

What even is a glove?

But just a covering for your hand? An external covering of an internal space? Protective in nature. It has other attributes like warmth or fashion, but in the end a glove is just protection from the world.

[voiceandgesture]

FingerSense: A way to think with your hands

What if we stopped creating new gestures and started using more body parts? FingerSense from Qeexo can tell the difference between your finger, fingernail, and thumb, and can differentiate between ends of a stylus, without using Bluetooth the way Pencil does.

FingerSense Overview (by Qeexo)

[voiceandgesture]

In dance, there is a practice called "marking". When dancers mark, they execute a dance phrase in a simplified, schematic or abstracted form. Based on our interviews with professional dancers in the classical, modern, and contemporary traditions, it is fair to assume that most dancers mark in the normal course of rehearsal and practice. When marking, dancers user their body-in-motion to represent some aspect of the full-out phrase they are thinking about. Their stated reason for marking is that it saves energy, avoids strenuous movement such as jumps, and sometimes it facilitates review of specific aspects of a phrase, such as tempo, movement sequence, or intention, all without the mental and physical complexity involved in creating a phrase full-out. It facilitates real-time reflection.

If you're a designer of gestural interfaces, you likely spend a lot of time marking, using your body to think about the interactions you have with a screen or camera or any machine space. This paper can give you a framework for thinking about marking and argues for the importance of going beyond 'imagining' interaction.

The opportunity to reconceptualize things is something that mental simulations does not offer. It is a major reason "externalizing" what is in mind is a more powerful strategy than working with things in the mind alone.

[voiceandgesture]

“I know that this isn’t an animal,” said Pierre Carter, 62, smiling down at the robot he calls Fluffy. “But it brings out natural feelings.”

[voiceandgesture]

This is a fabulous tumblr showcasing the great and awful elements of first time user experiences, generally on iPhone apps.

[voiceandgesture]

A great listen (it's 6 minutes long), this interview with Melissa Wagner is a good introduction to the sorts of gestures available to us as we design new interaction methods.

Buy a copy of the book super-cheap on Amazon

[voiceandgesture]

Human interfaces guidelines specific to Kinect. This site also includes information about speech, skeletal tracking, and data streams

Direct download for PDF

[voiceandgesture]

Founded in 2002, the International Society for Gesture Studies (ISGS) is the only international scholarly association devoted to the study of human gesture.

International Society for Gesture Studies (ISGS)

[voiceandgesture]

The design principles for Android Wear are a great place to start thinking about wearable gestural UIs and how to offer user support and adapt to user needs.

[voiceandgesture]

iOS 7 Head Gesture Controls Hands-On

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Moto X "Lazy Phone" Ad shows the "Quick Capture" gesture to turn the phone on and launch the camera app with two flicks of the wrist and a tap.

[voiceandgesture]

Official Kinect 2 0 Gestures Tutorial Xbox One

[voiceandgesture]

Best summarized by NNG, the paradox of the motivated user explains why people don't read the manual.

The "paradox of the active user" is a paradox because users would save time in the long term by taking some initial time to optimize the system and learn more about it. But that's not how people behave in the real world, so we cannot allow engineers to build products for an idealized rational user when real humans are irrational: we must design for the way users actually behave.

Abstract One of the most sweeping changes ever in the ecology of human cognition may be taking place today. People are beginning to learn and use very powerful and sophisticated information processing technology as a matter of daily life. From the perspective of human history, this could be a transitional point dividing a period when machines merely helped us do things from a period when machines will seriously help us think about things. But if this is so, we are indeed still very much within the transition. For most people, computers have more possibility than they have real practical utility.

[voiceandgesture]

Demo video for the Weather Channel Leap Motion app. See more about the app on the Leap Motion website.