A Framework for Gesture Interface Design

Abstract

Gesture interfaces have long been pursued in the context of portable computing and immersive environments. However, such interfaces have been difficult to build, in part due to a lack of frameworks for their design and implementation. This paper presents a framework for automatically producing a gesture interface based on a simple interface description. Rather than defining hand poses in a low level high-dimensional joint angle space, we describe and recognize gestures in a “lexical” space, in which each hand pose is decomposed into elements in a finger-pose alphabet. The alphabet and underlying rules are defined as a gesture notating system called GeLex. By implementing a generic hand pose recognition algorithm, and a mechanism to adapt it to a specific application based on an interface description, developing a gesture interface becomes straightforward.