Summary of Whack Gestures: Inexact and Inattentive Interaction with Mobile Devices
Whack Gestures describes techniques for interacting with mobile devices more passively for the purpose of making other activities take precedent over mobile device use- so that mobile devices become less of of distraction.
To tackle the disruptive actions of silencing a ringing cell phone etc. they’ve created a set of gestures that they call “inactive and inattentive”, meaning they require less focus than present standard mobile device interactions. The technological approach is based on retrieving accelerometer data from the phone’s internal sensor and differentiating between various “whacks” to the phone.
The paper acknowledges that because mobile devices are regularly moving, there is a challenge in noting a whack as different than regular activity. This is done by setting a threshh