WS-Gesture, a gesture-based state-aware control framework

Industry has capitalized on people´s urge for gadgets and innovative appliances. The most popular devices are still entertainment systems, but home automation, e.g. automated heating and lighting control, is gaining more and more interest. To manage the vast amount of remote controls that come with these appliances, universal remote controls were created. These are unfortunately hard to configure and hard to use, due to the numerous buttons. This paper presents the architecture of the WS-Gesture framework. An alternative of interacting with this pervasive environment of devices, inspired by the success of Nintendo Wii´s Remote, where the user interacts by means of gestures. To cope with the many different features of the devices, state-awareness is introduced in the system. Depending on which user is controlling a selected device and on the current state of that device, a particular gesture can result in different actions. Communication is based on Device Profile for Web Services, an emerging standard delivering discovery and dynamic selection capabilities. During implementation and evaluation special attention has been payed to accuracy and the responsiveness, very important for the user experience.