Kick Gestures for Mobile Interactions

Mobile devices interact with people’s lives frequently and widely. Prob-lems have arisen as a result in many situations such as when people could not use their phones effectively. For example, it is not conve-nient for users to type on a touch screen phone while wearing gloves during the winter, or when carrying heavy bags. Foot gestures provide a broad design space that can help solve the problem of mobile phone use while hands are busy or occupied. In this thesis, we look into kicking gestures as a new input method for mobile phones. The thesis first focuses on human capabilities of controlling foot-kicking gestures for mobile interaction tasks. Studies were carried out through football games to investigate how effectively people can control their kick in terms of directions and velocities. The studies show that users are able to aim their kicks best when the range of directions is divided into larger than 24 ◦ segments. The studies also show that the user