What is MouseGesture.org?

MouseGesture.org is a site devoted to mouse gesture interaction. We love mouse gestures and our aim is to promote its popularity as a computer desktop tool.

This site contains an introduction to mouse gesture interaction and includes a number of links to articles, useful resources and sites about mouse gesture interaction. This site also includes a review of three gesture tools available for Windows systems.

 

What is Mouse Gesture or Mouse Stroke Interaction?

Mouse gesturing is a form of interaction that allows the user to operate a computer with symbols drawn using the mouse pointer. Typically this is done by holding down the right mouse key and drawing symbol such as a letter shape.

You Tube video clip showing an example of mouse gesture interaction

YouTube video of Mojo Desktop Sidekick

The above clip is of Mojo Desktop Sidekick which is a virtual pet gesture tool, there is also a straight Mojo gesture tool available. The video will be replaced with a specifically gesture example time permitting.

Many gesture programs use what are called uni-stroke gestures, where the symbol has to be drawn in one stroke without the pen leaving the page - as it were. In mouse stroke interaction the holding down the right mouse key while drawing the symbol is used to indicate that a gesture is being inputted. The problem is finding an appropriate way of indicating when the 'pen' has been lifted of the page. In pen and tablet based interaction where this can be accomplished multi-stroke interaction is more commonplace.

You can also try mouse gesture interaction with the Flash example below. Stricktly speaking this is a Graffiti for text input example but the gestures used are similar to the single stroke gestures commonly found in gesture shortcut tools. Example from Didier Brun's site bytearray.org. Note that we have only tested this very clever flash object in Internet Explorer and some gestures are not recognised 100%.

Some 'agents of precision' refer to mouse gesture interaction, as mouse stroke interaction. Mouse gestures refer to two-dimensional movements that do not leave a trace, whereas the word 'strokes' implies two-dimensional movements on a flat surface.

Confusingly, common practice is to refer to mouse gestures as simply gesture interaction. The problem for some is that gestures interaction refers to three-dimensional movement such as body language or facial expression, whereas the word 'strokes' implies two-dimensional movements on a flat surface, leaving a trace or mark. Stroke interaction on a tablet device is often referred to as inking.

Mouse gesture interaction as an accessibility tool

Gestures have some useful benefits for users with motor impairment, either impairment due to painful joints from arthritis and other conditions, such as RSI. Gesture interaction avoids wrist and hand tension when repetitively selecting small buttons and controls. The use of gestures that can be executed anywhere on the screen avoids large movements, such as reaching for controls, which are almost always positioned at the edge of a display and reduces the need to continually swap the hand between the mouse and keyboard. Gestures also offer and alternative model of interaction, which reduces the sole reliance on actions that aggravate an injury or condition.

Discussions, tip and advice

This section dicussess aspects of gesture interaction and

 

Software Reviews

This section provides a review of the three most popular mouse gesture tools currently available in order of our preference

Mojo Gesture

Mojo sidekick and Mojo Gesture are both free gesture utilities that come preset and ready configured with a whole host of gesture shortcuts. These tools are simple and cannot be customised, although we are told this is intended for future editions. However do note that customisation is a power user feature, most users use a modest range of gestures to perform a common set of activities, which are all supported in both Mojo gesture tools. There is plenty in Mojo for new and experienced users. Face it you wouldn't expect software to come half finished with the menus requiring configuring.

The Mojo gesture tools is free and comes with a free 21 days trial of the fully featured versions which have a wide range of gestures. For example there is a very cool gesture that allows the user to reposition and resize a window with a single gesture. Mojo also has a useful little gesture that allows the user to gesture to press the enter key, which is useful for dismissing pop-up message boxes, without having to swap your hand form the mouse to the keyboard.

A problem of gesture interaction is feedback notification, which is required to indicate whether the gesture has been inputted correctly by indicting the gesture recognized and the corresponding command activated, Mojo achieves this with pop-up click-through notifications panels.

Mojo Sidekick provides a useful solution to the problem of learning the range of gestures by providing pop-up cheat-sheets, that show a list of gestures, when the mouse pointer is held down. Although, at present Mojo is not customisable it is comprehensive and is the easiest to learn and the easiest to use of all the tools reviewed on this site.

 

Mojo Gesture Sidekick

Mojo Sidekick is the same tool as Mojo gesture but has a number of characters, such as a Juju the gecko and spooky the ghost. Mojo Gesture can also be configured to display animated floating controls, such as a floating clock however, these features are not set on install, since they don't appeal to everyone and so have to be selected.

 

Sensiva

Sensiva is by far the most commonly found tool for mouse gesture interaction, however this product is expensive at $69.95USD. it is highly configurable, but requires the user to most of the customisation, since there are only a preset gestures. The product is quite proprietary and has a number of preset gestures that link to sponsor's websites.

There is a minor known bug; executing a gesture resets focus meaning gestures cannot be used to interact with a specific control element, such as a button or frame. This creates a subtle but quite significant bug. The user is unable to do a right-click select on a menu item to access properties. For example this feature is used in the Web browsers Internet explorer and Firefox to access properties and organise items contained in the favourites/bookmarks menu option.

There is no support for prompting the user of what symbols are available and the different meanings they may possess. This often leads to the user only using a few gestures that they can remember.

There is no convenient quick reference to assist the user in learning the appropriate gestures. However there is a gesture to summon the control dialog that contains all gesture, though the gesture used to do this is a little hard to recall how to perform. This presents no real problem since this gesture can easily be changed. Configuring Sensiva could be a lot easier to configure by removing some of the unnecessary steps.

Stroke it

Stroke it is a no frills gesture engine that is accurate. The product comes configured with a number of gesture, and is capable of being customised to suit the needs of the user.

There are some minor difficulties. If it doesn’t recognise a gesture it pops up a dialog prompting the users to train Stroke it to learn the gesture, which can be an unwelcome interruption if Strokeit simply failed to recognise the gesture correctly or you made a mistake, such as getting the gesture wrong or wanting cancel a gesture. It is common practice for users to scribble to cancel a gesture command just before the mouse button is released, so that the gesture cannot be interpreted; this makes the training feature quite unwelcome.

The interface for Strokeit is extremely comprehensive, however it could do with being a lot more user friendly. Although, Strokeit is providing the novel interaction model of gestures, for which there is no standard, especially universal and common accepted standards, it provides no visual prompts, examples or even description of the gestures that are available. There are no readily available help resources and there is no context menu for the taskbar icon. Also, there is no gesture to summon the control panel.

Strokeit has no support for prompting the user of what symbols are available and the different meanings they may possess. This often leads to the user only using a few gestures that they can remember. There is no convenient quick reference to assist the user in learning the appropriate gestures. It has been suggested that StrokeIt crashes more often in Windows Vista and that there are some stability issues, although we have never experienced these difficulties..

Though it is noted that Strokeit is free and is a pleasingly accurate gesture engine, the product itself appears to be a straight-forward promotion of the gesture engine itself, which no doubt is the underlying technology of many gesture based software that are currently available.

 

Resources

This is a resource

 

External Links

Mojo Desktop Sidekick
Mojo Gesture
Sensiva
Stroke it
Mouse gestures for Accessibility

Bit of fun