Motion-Pointing: Target Selection using Elliptical Motions

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Summary:
Motion-pointing is the action of using gestures to indicate a click instead of clicking an actual item.  For example a typically click-able item will have a gesture associated with it such as making a circle or an ellipse with your finger or mouse.  By associating a gesture with an action the user can make selections with less cost due to the fact that they don't have to make precise movements to the button.  The gesture can be done at any location on the screen.

The authors chose cyclic motions because of the human minds ease in understanding and interpreting these motions.  They argue that humans are better able to deal with these types of motion there by reducing the learning curve associated with the actions.

One of the proposed uses for this style of interface was for large public screens such as in an airport.  The authors propose that multiple pointers would be confusing and users could simply approach the screen and utilize the motions on their iPhone or PDA.  In this case the motion, as they argue, would be useful because it would allow multiple people access the the same terminal without having to touch or reach the screen.

Discussion
I personally found this work to be somewhat worthless in todays culture.  People are quite dedicated to point and click and this is a radical difference from that style of interface.  Their example regarding the airport screen could easily be solved using a keypad on the PDA where each selection corresponds to a number that the user enters instead of requiring the gesture.

The largest concern I would express regarding these gestures would be the lack of precision.  I remember attempting the write on the older PDA's that used predetermined gestures for writing.  The accuracy was never good enough to do anything useful and it just seems that this paper is attempting to resurrect a thankfully dead technology.  The paper even mentions issues in accuracy which could render the entire system useless.

I personally would not want to see this program continue.  The system has been tried before and failed then.  I can only see headaches resulting from continuing down this path again.