The paper I chose was Scott Hudson’s paper “Whack Gestures: Inexact and Inattentive Interaction with Mobile Devices” (2011). It introduced the concept of “whack gestures” as a new form of interaction with mobile devices. Rather than relying on more precise and deliberate touch inputs, whack gestures allowed for a means of interaction that require only minimal user attention. This approach is intended for situations where users need to interact quickly and with little focus. An example of such usage was quickly responding to (e.g. silencing) a ringing phone.
Hudson discusses the development and use of interfaces that accommodate these inexact gestures. He emphasizes the importance of building systems that can recognize and respond to uncertain or incomplete user input while maintaining accuracy. User testing of the effectiveness of their implementation demonstrated that it is possible to design a system that achieves both high accuracy and low false positive rates.
Both in this paper and in Hudson’s talk “The Future is Not What it Used to Be,” the concepts of uncertainty and ubiquitous computing are important considerations for future human-computer interactions. In his talk, Hudson discussed the uncertainty involved in natural interaction with gesture, speech etc. and using recognizers to decipher inputs. He then described Julia Schwarz’s approach to addressing the uncertainty with Monte Carlo probability representations and a particle filtering approach. He also proposed the possibility of zero (or negative) latency interfaces that arise when interactions are handled in this way. Ultimately, both the paper and the talk reflect technology adapting to human behavior despite how inexact and inattentive the behavior might be.