Title: Freehand interaction with a paper-based input interface

Authors: Marco Porta

Addresses: Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale e dell'Informazione, Università di Pavia, Via Adolfo Ferrata 5, 27100 Pavia, Italy

Abstract: Graphical user interfaces may sometimes not be fully comfortable, because they require oculomotor coordination and relatively precise mouse movement. While physical interfaces can be the right choice for purpose-specific appliances, they become less practicable in the case of interfaces for software tools, since each program would need its own physical interface. This paper presents a gesture input approach based on a paper interface, appraising its efficiency and investigating the user acceptance level. Through fingers, users can operate interface controls either drawn by themselves or provided in ready-to-use pre-printed sheets. The implemented prototype, based on computer vision, relies on a simple and cheap webcam, and controls consist of sliders, buttons, knobs and trackpads. Experiments have shown that the proposed approach is practicable in terms of both performance and positive reception by users, although some inherent problems of vision-based systems must be taken into account.

Keywords: computer vision; gesture input; paper interface; perceptive user interfaces; sketch interfaces; freehand sketching.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2016.078759

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2016 Vol.54 No.2, pp.106 - 120

Received: 09 Mar 2015
Accepted: 18 Jun 2015
Published online: 02 Sep 2016 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article