Context Sensitive Gestures

Touchscreens and stylus input are becoming increasingly popular in modern computers. However, many programs still require keyboard input in order to take full advantage of their functionality. In order to increase the functionality of screen-based input, gestures are being adopted to input commands. However, current gesture interfaces are not sufficiently context-based, which limits their usefulness to a few applications, and they are not dynamic or interactive, which wastes time and keeps the user from feeling comfortable using them. In order to improve gesture functionality, we used off-the-shelf hardware and implemented a gesture-based system which changed gesture function based on currently running application, and based on recent gesture activity. The result of application-sensitivity was a system which is useable on many modern computers and provides useful functionality in a variety of applications. The results of sensitivity to previous gestures, however, was only minimal interactivity.