GestureWiz: A Human-Powered Gesture Design Environment for User Interface Prototypes

Designers and researchers often rely on simple gesture recognizers like Wobbrock et al.'s $1 for rapid user interface prototypes. However, most existing recognizers are limited to a particular input modality and/or pre-trained set of gestures, and cannot be easily combined with other recognizers. In particular, creating prototypes that employ advanced touch and mid-air gestures still requires significant technical experience and programming skill. Inspired by $1's easy, cheap, and flexible design, we present the GestureWiz prototyping environment that provides designers with an integrated solution for gesture definition, conflict checking, and real-time recognition by employing human recognizers in a Wizard of Oz manner. We present a series of experiments with designers and crowds to show that GestureWiz can perform with reasonable accuracy and latency. We demonstrate advantages of GestureWiz when recreating gesture-based interfaces from the literature and conducting a study with 12 interaction designers that prototyped a multimodal interface with support for a wide range of novel gestures in about 45 minutes.