"Those look similar!" issues in automating gesture design advice

A. Chris Long, James A. Landay, and Lawrence A. Rowe. 2001. "Those look similar!" issues in automating gesture design advice. In Proceedings of the 2001 workshop on Perceptive user interfaces (PUI '01). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1-5. DOI=10.1145/971478.971510 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/971478.971510

This paper discusses developing a system for application designers to use for judging the similarity of gestures. The paper claims that both human perceptual similarity and computer recognition similarity are considered in advising the designer. The human perceptual data is based on a very limited sampling of which gestures people believed to be similar or different. The machine recognition similarity is based on how well the gesture is distinguished using the Rubine algorithm.

Overall this paper's results are questionable at best. The paper makes several contradictory claims and uses a limited sample size as its basis. Furthermore, the authors follow their "intuition" rather than designing rigorous studies, and admit that their system is incorrect in several cases. Much of the paper is spent describing basic HCI which is not related to gestures. The paper offers very few technical descriptions. In summary, this paper is of limited use for modern gesture design.