OctoPocus: A Dynamic Guide for Learning Gesture-Based Command Sets

Comments
Nate

Summary
In OctoPocus: A Dynamic Guide for Learning Gesture-Based Command Sets, Olivier Bau and Wendy E. Mackay present a new dynamic guide that combines on-screen feedback to help users learn new sets of gestures to control their devi ces: OctoPocus. It can be applied to lots of different single-stroke gestures, and helps users smoothly learn the set with as little effort and time as possible. Their goal was to not focus on making the gesture-recognition algorithm better, but instead teaching the users to perform the gestures correctly so that they can use any algorithm.

The program focus on using "dynamic guides" to help the user learn the gestures. This consists of feedforward information, which explains to the user the current set of options, and what the gesture should look like if completed correctly, and feedback, which explains to the user how well the current gesture has been recognized. OctoPocus only appears if the user has hesitated, so that expert users can continue to work without being interrupted by an annoying explanation interface. When a user hestitates, the system reveals each gesture's intended path, and also feedback on how well the user has done the gesture thus far. If more than one gesture has the same initial stroke, the system will show the possible options from that current point in the gesture, as shown in the picture below.

After doing user studies with the system, the researchers found that users liked the system and were able to learn and execute gesture-based commands much more quickly than other help systems.

Discussion

I thought this seemed a little out of place, because I can't think of any current gesture-based systems where you make gestures to choose options. While touch-screen phones have gestures to zoom in or out, or move menus around, they usually have dedicated touch-screen buttons to execute commands. But, as I know that all input systems seem to be going towards touch-screen in the future, then we may possibly need these help systems for learning complicated gestures. I especially liked the idea that experts can go through the gestures quickly without being affected by the help system, because I know that if it always showed up then I would get tired fast!