FAAST-R: Defining a Core Mechanic for Designing Gestural Interfaces

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. CHI’12, May 5–10, 2012, Austin, Texas, USA. Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1016-1/12/05...$10.00. Abstract We present a syntax for representing human gestures using rule sets that correspond to the basic spatial and temporal components of an action. These individual rules form primitives that, although conceptually simple on their own, can be combined both simultaneously and in sequence to form sophisticated gestural interactions. Along with a graphical user interface for custom gesture creation, this approach was incorporated into the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit as a recognition module (FAAST-R). This toolkit can either be used to facilitate the development of motion-based user interfaces or to repurpose existing closed-source applications and games by mapping body motions to keyboard and mouse events. Thus, this work represents an important step towards making gestural interaction more accessible for practitioners, researchers, and hobbyists alike.