Jean Vanderdonckt
Addressing Philosophical, Physical, and Technological Questions in the Creation of Micro-gestures
In Human-Computer Interaction, micro-gestures are often referred to as small, subtle, and rapid physical movements (usually of the fingers or hand) used to control devices, that can be executed in the range of 1 to 4 seconds. Micro-gestures are part of micro-interactions, which are assumed to be short-time interruptions of a primary interactive task to accomplish an auxiliary action. As micro-gestures have become a full area of research and a first-class citizen for gestural interaction, we reflect on three philosophical, physical, and technological questions in their creation and usage as an example of general questions for any interaction. Our philosophical question is: if micro-gestures become a primary means of interaction, to what extent do they blur the boundary between intentional human action and micro-gesture recognition, and how might this reshape our understanding of agency and autonomy? Our physical question is: what are the biomechanical and perceptual limits of micro-gestures, and how can we distinguish micro-gestures from involuntary movements? Our technological question is: how can sensing technologies and recognition algorithms be designed to accurately detect and recognize micro-gestures in real time while ensuring robustness across diverse contexts of use?
Jean Vanderdonckt is a Full Professor of Computer Science at Université catholique de Louvain (UCL, Belgium), where he is Head of the Louvain Interaction Laboratory (LiLab) since 1998. He holds a Master and an aggregation in Mathematics, a Master in Computer Science and a PhD in Sciences from the University of Namur. He has been Visiting Associate Professor at Stanford University (2000), invited professor at Univ. of Fortaleza (2001), and permanent invited prof. at Polytechnic Univ. of Valencia. He has over 25 years of experience in research and development. Being ACM member since 1987, he is currently ACM and IEEE Senior Member, and member of ACM SIGCHI. He received several awards (e.g., the IBM Belgium Award in Computer Science in 1998, the ACM Service Award for Contributions to ACM in 2004, 2006, and 2010, the Brian Shackel Award in HCI in 2007, the ITEA Research Excellence Award in 2013) and fellowships (e.g., Fulbright-Hayes fellowship in 2000, NATO Advanced Fellowship in 2001). In 2000, he co-created and led BelCHI, the Belgian chapter of ACM SIGCHI (Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction). He is the current tenure holder of the IBM-UCL Chair in Strategic Management of Information Systems. He is currently co-editor-in-chief of Springer HCI Series.