KIND‐DAMA: A modular middleware for Kinect‐like device data management

Abstract

SummaryIn the last decades, we have witnessed a growing interest toward touchless gestural user interfaces. Among other reasons, this is due to the large availability of different low-cost gesture acquisition hardware (the so-called "Kinect-like devices"). As a consequence, there is a growing need for solutions that allow to easily integrate such devices within actual systems. In this paper, we present KIND-DAMA, an open and modular middleware that helps in the development of interactive applications based on gestural input. We first review the existing middlewares for gestural data management. Then, we describe the proposed architecture and compare its features against the existing similar solutions we found in the literature. Finally, we present a set of studies and use cases that show the effectiveness of our proposal in some possible real-world scenarios.

PolyRec Gesture Design Tool: A tool for fast prototyping of gesture‐based mobile applications

“…We report them here only for completeness since these types of gestures are out of the scope of our current proposal. Among these systems we can mention MAGIC (Multiple Action Gesture Interface Creation), 27 a tool that allows to design motion gestures without specific knowledge of pattern matching, and also test them in order to ensure that they are not triggered unintentionally by the user (false positives); GRDT (Gesture Recognition Design Toolkit), 28 a set of tools to support gesture creations; Mogeste, 29 a tool that allows designers to define, train, and test new motion gestures just captured through the inertial sensors in a commodity device (e.g., smartphone); EventHurdle, 30 a visual design tool that support designers in exploratory prototyping, provides functionality to integrate the defined gestures into a prototype for their automatic recognition, and supports handled gestures through physical sensors, remote gestures through a camera, and also touchscreen gestures; ProGesture, 31 that supports rapid prototyping of full body gestures by combining three design matters: gesture, presentation, and dialog; KIND‐DAMA, 32 a modular middleware for developing interactive applications based on gestures on Kinect‐like devices; KinectAnalysis, 33 a system for elicitation studies on the Microsoft Kinect, with support for recording, analysis and sharing; GestureAnalyzer, 34 a tool that allows gesture analysis by applying clustering and visualization techniques to the gesture data captured by motion tracking; CUBOD, 35 which allows users to design and customize their own gestures, rather than relying on those defined by designers, and offers feedback to guide users through the design process in order to avoid gestures that are difficult to distinguish from others, difficult to execute with consistency, or too similar to unintended movements; and HotSpotizer, 36 another system that allows users to define their own custom gestures, in this case to map them into keyboard commands, in order to use them in arbitrary applications.…”