Putting your best foot forward: investigating real-world mappings for foot-based gestures

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Abstract

Foot-based gestures have recently received attention as an alternative interaction mechanism in situations where the hands are pre-occupied or unavailable. This paper investigates suitable real-world mappings of foot gestures to invoke commands and interact with virtual workspaces. Our first study identified user preferences for mapping common mobile-device commands to gestures. We distinguish these gestures in terms of discrete and continuous command input. While discrete foot-based input has relatively few parameters to control, continuous input requires careful design considerations on how the user’s input can be mapped to a control parameter (e.g. the volume knob of the media player). We investigate this issue further through three user-studies. Our results show that rate-based techniques are significantly faster, more accurate and result if far fewer target crossings compared to displacement-based interaction. We discuss these findings and identify design recommendations.

Citation

Jason Alexander, Teng Han, William Judd, Pourang Irani and Sriram Subramanian. 2012. Putting your best foot forward: investigating real-world mappings for foot-based gestures. In Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI 2012). Austin, Texas. ACM, 1229-1238.

Bibtext Entry

@INPROCEEDINGS { JasonCHI2012,
    AUTHOR = { Jason Alexander and Teng Han and William Judd and Pourang Irani and Sriram Subramanian },
    TITLE = { Putting your best foot forward: investigating real-world mappings for foot-based gestures },
    BOOKTITLE = { Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI 2012) },
    YEAR = { 2012 },
    PAGES = { 1229--1238 },
    PUBLISHER = { ACM },
    ADDRESS = { Austin, Texas },
}