Researchers have developed proof-of-concept technology that allows people to do common smartphone tasks – listen to music, take a phone call, and order food – all by making simple, not-too-socially-awkward gestures with their feet while they’re walking.
We walk a lot in our day-to-day lives, be it walking to work, to the shops, or taking the dog to the park. Indeed, the average adult takes between 3,500 and 7,000 steps daily. But what if you could use your feet to do something cool while you were walking? Like ordering Uber Eats or skipping a song on your Spotify playlist?
Researchers from the University of Waterloo in Canada have led a study that brings this kind of technology a step closer to reality (no pun intended). In it, they ordered a coffee, controlled a music app, and answered phone calls on an augmented reality headset while moving, using only intentional foot movements.
“There’s a long history of using feet to control machines,” said Ching-Yi Tsai, the study’s lead author and a former visiting scholar at Waterloo’s David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. “For example, the pedals on the car, but very little research has been done into using the way we walk as an input for a device.”
Waterloo professor of computer science Daniel Vogel came up with the idea for a gait-controlled device when, on a cold day, he had to stop walking and pull his hands out of his warm pockets to order a coffee using an app on his phone. He wondered if there was a way of ordering coffee without having to stop.
From looking at previous studies, Vogel and his colleagues identified a set of 22 potential time-based foot gestures – they called them ‘gait gestures’ – that varied a person’s regular gait but allowed them to keep moving forward without too much interruption. In a 25-person study, the researchers examined the gestures for their compatibility with walking, ease of movement, and, importantly, social acceptability.
“Extreme movements like dance steps or a jump would likely be easy for a system to recognize, but these might be harder to perform, and they would deviate too far from normal walking for people to feel comfortable doing them in public,” Vogel said. “We didn’t want users to feel like someone from Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks!”
For those readers unfamiliar with the British comedy troupe’s absurd – and often hilarious – work, the video above is a shortened version of the Ministry of Silly Walks sketch that first aired in 1970, during season two of the TV show Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Those of you who’ve seen it before can enjoy watching it again.
From the 22 gait gestures the researchers looked at, they identified seven they considered optimal (read: not totally embarrassing to perform in public) and input them into a proof-of-concept interaction design interface for an augmented reality (AR) headset. In a follow-up study, the ability of these seven gait gestures to enable AR interactions was tested. Each participant was shown the seven gestures and, while wearing an AR headset, was asked to perform specific tasks while walking: play a song, adjust the volume, order a café latte, and decline or accept an incoming phone call.
Overall, the system’s accuracy in identifying the gait gestures was an impressive 92%. Generally, participants responded positively to the tech, finding it easy to use and indicating that they’d use it again.
“We aren’t at a point yet where AR headsets are widely used,” said Tsai. “But this research shows that if we get there, this input option has got legs!”
Ba-dum TISH!
The study was published in the proceedings of the Association for Computing Machine (ACM) Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) 2024.
Source: University of Waterloo