Gestures for Smart Rings

Abstract

We present empirical results about users' gesture preferences for smart rings by analyzing 672 gestures from 24 participants. We report an overall low consensus (mean .112, maximum .225 on the unit scale) between participants' gesture proposals, and we point to the challenges of designing highly-generalizable ring gestures across users. We also contribute to the practice of gesture elicitation studies by discussing how a priori conditions (e.g., participants' traits, such as creativity and motor skills), commitment and behavior during the experiment (e.g., their thinking times), but also a posteriori aspects (the experimenter's choice of criteria to group gestures into categories) affect agreement. We offer design guidelines for ring gestures informed by our empirical observations, and present a collection of gestures reflective of our participants' mental models for effecting commands using smart rings.