Beyond Touch: Natural Interactions Using Facial Expressions

As electronic gadgets become more user friendly, we find natural interaction with the gadgets becoming increasingly popular. Haptic devices have become immensely popular and touch and gesture based interfaces are the logical extension to natural user interaction. We propose to use facial expressions for natural interaction, especially for gadgets like smart phones and tablets where it is more appropriate to capture human faces for user interaction. We present a use-case scenario of an eBook Reader application wherein the user performs certain facial expressions naturally to control the device while using this application. We detect, recognize and interpret these facial expressions for natural interaction with the application. More broadly we want to fit such facial expression based natural interaction to the entire device, not limiting it to a particular application. As we move forward, devices will have to be personalized to comprehend subtle and implicit cues from the user instead of waiting for an explicit input.