A grammar for specifying full-body gestures elicited for abstract tasks

Abstract

A gesture elicitation study consists of a popular method for eliciting a sample of end end users to propose gestures for executing functions in a certain context of use, specified by its users and their functions, the device or the platform used, and the physical environment in which they are working. Gestures proposed in such a study needs to be classified and, perhaps, extended in order to feed a gesture recognizer. To support this process, we conducted a full-body gesture elicitation study for executing functions in a smart home environment by domestic end users in front of a camera. Instead of defining functions opportunistically, we define them based on a taxonomy of abstract tasks. From these elicited gestures, a XML-compliant grammar for specifying resulting gestures is defined, created, and implemented to graphically represent, label, characterize, and formally present such full-body gestures. The formal notation for specifying such gestures is also useful to generate variations of elicited gestures to be applied on-the-fly on gestures in order to allow one-shot learning.