Gesture-based mobile interfaces require users to change the way they use technology in public settings. Since mobile phones are part of our public appearance, designers must integrate gestures that users perceive as acceptable for public use. This topic has received little attention in the literature so far. The studies described in this paper begin to look at the social acceptability of a set of gestures with respect to location and audience in order to investigate possible ways of measuring social acceptability. The results of the initial survey showed that location and audience had a significant impact on a user's willingness to perform gestures. These results were further examined through a user study where participants were asked to perform gestures in different settings (including a busy street) over repeated trials. The results of this work provide gesture design recommendations as well as social acceptability evaluation guidelines.

Interaction techniques that require users to adopt new behaviors mean that designers must take into account social acceptability and user experience otherwise the techniques may be rejected by users as they are too embarrassing to do in public. This research uses a set of low cost prototypes to study social acceptability and user perceptions of multimodal mobile interaction techniques early on in the design process. We describe 4 prototypes that were used with 8 focus groups to evaluate user perceptions of novel multimodal interactions using gesture, speech and nonspeech sounds, and gain feedback about the usefulness of the prototypes for studying social acceptability. The results of this research describe user perceptions of social acceptability and the realities of using multimodal interaction techniques in daily life. The results also describe key differences between young users (18-29) and older users (70-95) with respect to approach to understanding and preference of these interaction techniques.

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In the past, the design of gesture-based interfaces has focused on issues of gesture recognition with consideration of social or practical factors that affect the ability of users to perform gestures on the go largely missing. This work describes two important aspects of gestures design for mobile gesture and body-based interaction. First, this paper discusses the social acceptability of using gesture-based interfaces in the variety of locations where mobile interfaces are used. This includes a discussion of a variety of methods that can be used to evaluate social acceptability early on in the development process. Second, this paper discusses the practical implications of creating gesture recognition using accelerometer based sensing given the challenges of gesturing in mobile situations. This includes a discussion of body-based interactions and the scenarios where these might be used successfully.

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