3D Accelerometer-based Gestures for Interacting with Mobile Devices

Abstract

Mobile devices and apps have become an essential part of our daily life activities. Multi-touch gesture interaction directly on the touch screen is one of the most common ways to interact with mobile devices. However, in special circumstances (e.g., disabilities, wet hands, wearing heavy gloves outside in cold weather, etc.) it is difficult to interact directly on the touch screen. In this work, we focus on utilizing the 3D accelerometer sensor, available in most of the current mobile devices, as a way to provide an alternative set of gestures to the standard set of multi-touch gestures. We defined these 3D accelerometer-based gestures' definitions based on a user study and built an opens-source library, called 3DA-Gest, for providing the functionality to be used by mobile application developers. Further, we built a proof of concept map-based mobile app to check the working of our library. The preliminary conducted user study shows that users prefer to use our accelerometer-based gestures in special circumstances.