Metaphors and gestures
The concepts described hereinafter base on existing knowledge. The design of these applications was an investigation how the knowledge associated to eye closure could be used to interact differently with visual systems. Before going into the detail of every concept, I will give an overview of how the ideas relate to each other:
One of the first ideas in this project was the activation of a sniper scope in a shooter game through closing one eye - this eventually led to the principle of different perspectives on the screen contents, switched by closing the eyes individually.
The intuitive gesture of squinting the eyes to focus on an object was initially used to zoom in on an image. After user testing, the feature was, taking the user comments into account, modified to a 'preview' mode: By squinting, a transient preview (e.g. of a hyperlink or a file's contents) could be viewed - this feature is available in the final implementation.
A different approach, which is also discussed in this chapter, was the question of what a wink to the computer could cause. While it was initially used for the creation of smileys in a chat programme, it was used to record and play mini-macros later, similar to agreeing on a special action (or 'trick') with the computer.
