At the Mobile HCI poster session I had some fantastic discussions with some great people. There’s been a lot of around-device interaction research presented at the conference this week and a lot of people who I spoke to when presenting my poster asked: why would I want to do this?

That’s a very important question and the reason it gets asked can maybe give some insight into when around-device gestures may and may not be useful. A lot of people said that if they were already holding their phone, they would just use the touchscreen to provide input. Others said they would raise the device to their mouth for speech input or would even use the device itself for performing a gesture (e.g. shaking it).

In our poster and its accompanying paper, we focused on above-device gestures. We focus on a particular area of the around-device space – directly over the device – as we think this is where users are mostly likely to benefit from using gestures. People typically keep their phones on flat surfaces – Pohl et al. found this in their around-device device paper [link], Wiese et al. [link] found that in their CHI ’13 study, and Dey et al. [link] found that three years ago. As such, gestures are very likely to be used over a phone.

So, why would we want to gesture over our phones? My favourite example, and one which really seems to resonate with people, is using gestures to read recipes while cooking in the kitchen. Wet and messy hands, the risks of food contamination, the need for multitasking – these are all inherent parts of preparing food which can motivate using gestures to interact with mobile devices. Gestures would let me move through recipes on my phone while cooking, without having to first wash my hands. Gestures would let me answer calls while I multitask in the kitchen, without having to stop what I’m doing. Gestures would let me dismiss interruptions while I wash the dishes afterwards, without having to dry my hands.

This is just one scenario where we envisage above-device gestures being useful. Gestures are attractive for a variety of reasons in this context: touch input is inconvenient (I need to wash my hands first); touch input requires more engagement (I need to stop what I’m doing to focus); and touch input is unavailable (I need to dry my hands). I think the answer to why we would want to use these gestures is that they let us interact when other input is inconvenient. Our phones are nearby on surfaces so let’s interact with them while they’re there.

In summary, our work focuses on gestures above the device as this is where we see them being most commonly used. There are many reasons people would want to use around-device gestures but we think the most compelling ones motivate using above-device gestures.