GestIT: a declarative and compositional framework for multiplatform gesture definition

Gestural interfaces allow complex manipulative interactions that are hardly manageable using traditional event handlers. Indeed, such kind of interaction has longer duration in time than that carried out in form-based user interfaces, and often it is important to provide users with intermediate feedback during the gesture performance. Therefore, the gesture specification code is a mixture of the recognition logic and the feedback definition. This makes it difficult 1) to write maintainable code and 2) reuse the gesture definition in different applications. To overcome these kinds of limitations, the research community has considered declarative approaches for the specification of gesture temporal evolution . In this paper, we discuss the creation of gestural interfaces using GestIT, a framework that allows declarative and compositional definition of gestures for different recognition platforms (e.g. multitouch and fullbody), through a set of examples and the comparison with existing approaches