Step up the volume: Investigating the environmental effect on the range of possible foot-based interactions

The usual way of interacting with mobile devices is operating the graphical user interface on the touchscreen with fingertips. There are however many cases in which the user’s hands are occupied which demand an alternative way of interaction. In this paper, we presented a use case study to investigate the environmental effect on the possible foot gestures to operate a mobile device without removing it from the pocket. The participants intuitively performed their own foot gestures to execute five common music player commands in two different environments, either inside (alone in a room) or outside (with many people around). An optical flow analysis tool detected the intensity of the foot gestures in both conditions. However, the result revealed no significant effect on both conditions. The qualitative data reflects that the cognitive load is lower for the inside condition compared to the outside condition. Our study results provide first indications for the effectiveness of a foot-based interaction in this application area.