Microsoft aims to improve multitouch gestures

While much of the attention on multitouch surrounds what devices the interface will next find its way onto, Microsoft is also looking at how to improve the gestures themselves.

At the CHI 2009 computer-interface conference in Boston, which is running from 4-9 April, Microsoft is presenting ideas for how to perform 27 different commands — ideas that stemmed by showing test subjects a set of commands and asking them to do the most logical gesture. Those that were popular among multiple people were the ones the researchers said made the most sense.

"If they are going to be universal gestures we want them to be very natural," Microsoft researcher Meredith Morris said in an interview with ZDNet UK's sister site, CNET News.com, on Friday.

The research comes as the use of such gestures is starting to take off. Multitouch gesture controls are already an integrated part of the iPhone and Microsoft's Surface and are also supported on some notebook trackpads. Windows 7 adds operating system-level support for multitouch gestures.

While widely praised as intuitive, Microsoft's research shows that only some of the gestures used on multitouch devices make sense, Morris said. Other gestures, particularly those that involve using a specific number of features, are not very intuitive, Morris added.

That is because people tend not to associate gestures with the number of features they use.

"They don't assign meaning to that," Morris said, noting that Microsoft's research showed people tended to use one, two or three fingers interchangeably when performing a gesture. "We should be careful about that."

What users did like to do, Morris said, was make gestures in the air, something that today is not supported by devices such as the Surface or the iPhone, though other research prototypes have focused on mid-air gesture input.

"That speaks to how you might design next-generation systems," Morris said. "You might want additional camera so you can begin to get some of these."

In some cases, Morris said the research suggested multiple ways of generating a command. To activate the 'help' command, for example, the most popular suggestion was to draw a question mark on the surface with a finger. However, one participant suggested another way might to be to bring their hand towards themselves, as if to beckon for assistance.

Where the same suggestion was made by several people, Morris said her team tried to incorporate multiple gestures for the same command.

Morris is presenting a paper on the gesture research, as well as several other papers, at the CHI 2009 conference, an event that brings academics and people from the business world together to look at human-computer interaction. Microsoft is presenting or co-presenting a total of 25 papers, more than 10 percent of the total, Morris said.

Among the presentations Microsoft made at the event last year was MySong, a method for automatically adding background instruments to vocal tracks — a project that eventually became the publicly available Songsmith.