GearWheels: A Software Tool to Support User Experiments on Gesture Input with Wearable Devices
Ovidiu-Andrei Schipor, Radu-Daniel Vatavu · International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction · 2022
We introduce GearWheels, a software tool for studies about gesture input with wearables, including smartwatches, rings, and glasses. GearWheels features an event-based asynchronous software architecture design implemented exclusively with web standards, communications protocols, and data formats, which makes it flexible to support many wearables via HTTP and WebSocket communications. GearWheels differentiates from prior software tools for gesture acquisition, elicitation, recognition, and analysis with its web-based, wearable-oriented, experiment-centered architecture design. We demonstrate GearWheels with a device affixed to the index finger, wrist, and the temple of a pair of glasses to illustrate touch stroke-gesture and motion-gesture input acquisition. We also perform a technical evaluation of GearWheels in the form of a simulation experiment, and report the request-response time performance of the software components of GearWheels with off-the-shelf wearables. We release GearWheels as open source software to assist researchers and practitioners in implementing studies about gesture input with wearables.