Jacob Aron, technology reporter
Going hands-free with your phone normally involves using voice control, but that could soon change thanks to researchers who have another interpretation: kick gestures.
Sriram Subramanian and colleagues at the University of Bristol, UK and the University of Manitoba, Canada say there are many situations where your feet are the best choice of input. "For example, a mother holding a baby or a shopper carrying bags may not be able to answer their call or skip to the next song on their phone without putting down the baby or the shopping bags," he says, adding that people with dirty or gloved hands could also benefit.
To find out what kick gestures can do the researchers connected a Kinect sensor to a tablet computer held by the user. The Kinect tracked the user's foot motion and turned it into an on-screen kick, moving a virtual football in the desired direction.
Subramanian found that people could accurately distinguish between five different kick zones separated by an angle of 24 degrees - any more and it became difficult to aim in the right zone. He also found people could kick at two distinct speeds. These results, presented at the Mobile HCI conference in Stockholm, Sweden last week, suggest a number of useful kick gestures could work, such as kicking to flick through different screens or to navigate a menu with multiple options.
The current Kinect setup isn't very portable, but Subramanian expects that future phones will be paired to accelerometers in your shoes - the technology is already used by Nike and Apple to let iPhone owners track their running stats. "We have made some progress with our implementations and we can now detect many of the foot gestures with just accelerometers placed on both the feet," he says.
Going hands-free with your phone normally involves using voice control, but that could soon change thanks to researchers who have another interpretation: kick gestures.
Sriram Subramanian and colleagues at the University of Bristol, UK and the University of Manitoba, Canada say there are many situations where your feet are the best choice of input. "For example, a mother holding a baby or a shopper carrying bags may not be able to answer their call or skip to the next song on their phone without putting down the baby or the shopping bags," he says, adding that people with dirty or gloved hands could also benefit.
To find out what kick gestures can do the researchers connected a Kinect sensor to a tablet computer held by the user. The Kinect tracked the user's foot motion and turned it into an on-screen kick, moving a virtual football in the desired direction.
Subramanian found that people could accurately distinguish between five different kick zones separated by an angle of 24 degrees - any more and it became difficult to aim in the right zone. He also found people could kick at two distinct speeds. These results, presented at the Mobile HCI conference in Stockholm, Sweden last week, suggest a number of useful kick gestures could work, such as kicking to flick through different screens or to navigate a menu with multiple options.
The current Kinect setup isn't very portable, but Subramanian expects that future phones will be paired to accelerometers in your shoes - the technology is already used by Nike and Apple to let iPhone owners track their running stats. "We have made some progress with our implementations and we can now detect many of the foot gestures with just accelerometers placed on both the feet," he says.
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