In December of 2009, I successfully defended my thesis to satisfy the requirements for a Master of Science degree in Computer Science at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. It has been posted on their digital commons library in electronic format for all to see.
The link is here.
The system that I created actually used Flex/Flash along with Google Maps and a webcam to control panning in Google Maps with head turn. It ended up working decently well, and with some practice people ended up being faster and more accurate, in the evaluation tasks, with head gestures than with a touchpad on a laptop…interesting! The following is the abstract, to give you a little better idea of what the thesis is about:
Abstract
New, often free, spatial information applications such as mapping tools, topological imaging, and geographic information systems are becoming increasingly available to the average computer user. These systems, which were once available only to government, scholastic, and corporate institutions with highly skilled operators, are driving a need for new and innovative ways for the average user to navigate and control spatial information intuitively, accurately, and efficiently. Gestures provide a method of control that is well suited to navigating the large datasets often associated with spatial information applications. Several different types of gestures and different applications that navigate spatial data are examined. This leads to the introduction of a system that uses a visual head tracking scheme for controlling of the most common navigation action in the most common type of spatial information application, panning a 2-D map. The proposed head tracking scheme uses head pointing to control the direction of panning. The head tracking control is evaluated against the traditional control methods of the mouse and touchpad, showing a significant performance increase over the touchpad and comparable performance to the mouse, despite limited practice with head tracking.
