Gesture profile forweb services: An event-driven architecture to support gestural interfaces for smart environments

Abstract

Gestural interfaces have lately become extremely popular due to the introduction on the market of low-cost acquisition devices such as iPhone, Wii, and Kinect. Such devices allow practitioners to design, experiment, and evaluate novel interfaces and interactions for new smart environments. However, gesture recognition algorithms are currently the appanage of machine learning experts which sometimes leaves AmI practitioners dealing with complex pattern recognition techniques instead of focusing on prototyping ambient interactions. To address this problem, we propose GPWS (Gesture Profile forWeb Services), a service-oriented architecture (SOA) designed to assist implementation of gestural interfaces. By providing gesture recognition as a web service, we leverage easy and fast adoption of gestural interfaces for various platforms and environments through simple service discovery and composition mechanisms. We discuss two GPWS designs based on SOA 1.0 and SOA 2.0 standards, analyze their performance, and demonstrate GPWS for a gesture-controlled smart home application.