Cocktail: Exploiting Bartenders’ Gestures for Mobile Interaction

Today’s mobile devices are capable of creating and storing a large amount of multimedia data, but sharing such data with others remains challenging. Even when a user wishes to send a picture to a friend located next to the user, current wireless data transfer techniques usually demand several steps requiring inconvenient user involvement, such as manipulation of tiny buttons on a small touch screen. This paper presents ‘Cocktail’, a new gesture-based mobile interaction system that exploits gestures employed by bartenders for easy data sharing between co-located users. In our system, users can pour (transfer) multimedia data in their mobile devices to other friends’ devices in a manner akin to a bartender pouring a drink into a glass. Cocktail also provides an intuitive way of creating new content by mixing existing data with a shaking gesture. For example, users can make music videos with their favorite music and pictures in the mobile phone by selecting them and shaking the mobile phone. The authors have implemented a prototype of Cocktail with commercial smart phones and evaluated its usability via user studies.