Gestures

According to the “iPad Human Interface Guidelines” multifinger gestures are desirable for the interaction with the iPad. Some gestures are already selected by Apple for zooming, scrolling or to edit text (see post “Interaction with multi touchscreen and motion sensor“). The users have to learn these gestures. How is the situation, when somebody designs new gestures? What does the person have to keep in mind?
A German usability agency named “User Interface Design GmbH” conducted together with 11 other usability agencies around the world a study with the title “Mulit touch products: cultural differences and similarities of gestures”. One outcome was that the users use symbols to activate functions for example: help, save, to confirm, delete and print.

Help – “?”, save and confirm – “check mark”, delete – “X” and print “P” (User Interface Design 2009, p.25).

Prototype to conduct the study (User Interface Design, p.14):

I think the fact that people use symbol gestures to activate a function is really interesting and, what could this mean?

For me it could mean that users could learn intuitive new symbol gestures to activate functions. For example they could learn to use “C” to copy or a smile for fun in a chat situation. Maybe it is also possible to make two demission gestures and trace them by a camera like the example of imaginary interface from the Hasso Plattner Institut. The main idea is that a camera trace gestures in an imaginary interface. See imaginary interface from Hasso Plattner Institut: http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/baudisch/projects/imaginary_interfaces.html (see Baudisch 2010):

When it would be possible that a user can communicate with a device by using two dimensional symbolic gestures maybe he could use a form of sign language (Manataka American Indian Council 2010):

Baudisch, P., 2010: Imaginary Interfaces. Hasso Plattner Institut (online). Available at: http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/baudisch/projects/imaginary_interfaces.html [Accessed 23 November 2010].
Manataka American Indian Council, 2010: French and German Equivalents are shown with each Illustration. Manataka (online) http://www.manataka.org/page319.html [Accessed 23 November 2010]
Hansson, T. 2009: Multi-Touch-Produkte: Kulturelle Unterschiede und Gemeinsamkeiten bei der Nutzung von Gesten. User Interface Design. Available at: http://worldusabilityday.de/groups/mannheim/Multi-Touch_Produkte.pdf [Accessed 23 November 2010].