Comparative Studies of Gesture-Based and Sensor-Based Input Methods for Mobile User Interfaces

Three user studies were conducted to compare gesture-based and sensor-based interaction methods. The first study compared the efficiency and speed of three scroll navigation methods for touch-screen mobile devices: Tap Scroll (touch-based), Kinetic Scroll (gesture-based), and Fingerprint Scroll (our newly introduced sensor-based method). The second study compared the accuracy and speed of three zoom methods. One method was GyroZoom which uses the mobile phone's gyroscope sensor. The second one is Pinch-to-Zoom (Gesture-based) method. VolumeZoom, the third method, uses volume buttons that were reprogrammed to perform zoom operations. The third study on text entry compared a QWERTY-based onscreen keyboard with a novel 3D gesture-based Write-in-Air method. This method utilizes webcam sensors. Our key findings from the three experiments are that sensor-based interaction methods are intuitive and provide a better user experience than gesture-based interaction methods. The sensor-based methods were on par with the speed and accuracy of the gesture-based methods.