AirMouse: Turning a Pair of Glasses into a Mouse in the Air

This paper introduces a novel hand-free human–computer interaction system called AirMouse, which turns a common pair of glasses into a mouse to enable the interaction between computers and humans, especially for disabled people. The basic idea is to simulate mouse operations with head activities without using hands. To this end, an embedded device is attached to a pair of glasses, which leverages the gyroscope to accurately detect head activities and map them to corresponding mouse operations on devices (e.g., computers and smart TVs). In particular, AirMouse uses activities to simulate mouse operations instead of tracking the gaze or the head movements in the real-time manner. This provides flexibility to users allowing them to control devices even far away or not at front of the devices. We implement a prototype of AirMouse with the personalized pretraining module and the motion detection module, which is featured with low-cost, accurate, easy-to-use and real-time interaction, and evaluate AirMouse with 20 volunteers. The experimental results show that AirMouse achieves accurate, reliable, and real-time activity recognition and interaction. Specially, the technique of AirMouse can be integrated into wearable devices (e.g., smart glasses) to enrich their interaction functionalities.