Exploiting mid-air gestures to share data among devices

Abstract

The number of smart devices that people own or share with family and friends has increased dramatically. As a result, users often want to copy data among devices such as smart-phones, tablets and desktop computers. While various chat and cloud services support the sharing of data, they require users to interrupt their workflow to copy resources. We present MyoShare, a system that allows content to be shared among devices using mid-air gestures that can be used at any time, independent of the current task and location of devices. We report on an elicitation study where participants designed a set of gestures for sharing content. In a second user study, we compared mid-air gestures with alternative interaction modes using keyboard or touch Shortcuts, Speech, and Menu Selection. We discuss the results of the study in terms of both the strengths and weaknesses of mid-air gestures, along with suggestions for future work.