Running with drones: desired services and control gestures

Abstract

Due to their mobility, drones are in principle well-suited to support runners, but it is not yet clear, which services runners desire and how they would want to control them. We, therefore, conducted an online survey (N=22) to identify desired services and then asked runners to produce control gestures for those services in a realistic outdoor elicitation study (N=16). Our main contributions: (1) are a set of services that runners would want from a drone, such as taking a picture or calling the police; (2) a set of intuitive gestures for controlling flight actions and drone functions such as forming a square with both hands; and (3) insights into how runners propose gestures. We also evaluate and discuss the idea of modulating gestures on running movement as well as the tension between intuitiveness of a gesture and how much it interferes with the running movement.