New Insights into User-Defined Smart Ring Gestures with Implications for Gesture Elicitation Studies

Abstract

We conduct a replication of a previously published gesture elicitation study, which collected and examined user-defined gestures performed with smart rings. Our findings reveal that only 50% of the gestures elicited during our replication match those proposed by the participants of the original study, although our sample of participants had the same characteristics as the sample from the original study, and our participants spent the same amount of time to propose gestures and rated the goodness of their gesture-to-function mappings at the same level as the participants of the original study. Furthermore, the new gestures elicited in our replication present different articulation characteristics in terms of their structure, complexity, symmetry, and locale, compared to the gestures from the original study. Our results have implications for the theory and practice of gesture elicitation studies, for which we provide several recommendations for researchers and practitioners.