Nose know-how
“Would male and female participants prefer nose-based gestures differently?” That question is seldom asked. But Jorge-Luis Pérez-Medina, Santiago Villarreal and Jean Vanderdonckt do ask it in their study published in the journal Sensors.
The question, they say, helped guide their effort to pull together a taxonomy of nose-based gestures, which they hope will help them design new electronic sensing capabilities into eyeglasses, wristwatches and other devices.
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Nose-based gestures needn’t involve only the nose: any gesture that interacts with the nose can be considered nose-based. Fingers can be part of it, and so can other parts of the hand. Future research might involve other body parts and – maybe some day – foreign objects.
The researchers worked with 12 female volunteers and 12 male ones, asking them to make nose gestures to express specific commands, such as “turn on the TV”, “turn off the TV”, “turn the volume up” and “answer a phone call”. They identified 912 distinct gestures, which they “clustered into 53 unique gestures resulting in 23 categories, to form a taxonomy and a consensus set of 38 final gestures”.
Some gestures are easy to express in words, others aren’t. Commonly gestured gestures include “tap”, “push”, “flick”, “rub” and “pinch”. Among the gnarlier are “snook” and “hold nostrils open”. Gymnastics may be involved in certain of the more complex gestures: “double flick”, “triple pinch” and “quadruple drag”, for example. In contrast, one sees the gross simplicity of “finger in nose”.
The study suggests that, mostly, no significant nose-gestural difference exists between men and women.
Further nose know-how
That nose-gesture study built on a small body of nasal-centric investigations done by others that haven’t yet drawn extensive follow-up work.
Vlastimil Havran wrote in to bring “NoseTapping” to Feedback’s attention. In a study delivered at a conference in Luleå, Sweden, in 2013, Ondrej Polacek, Thomas Grill and Manfred Tscheligi opened some eyes with their paper:
They begin on a touching note, with their focus on “nose-based interaction in which people tap or swipe with their nose on a touchscreen”. NoseTapping, they say, could benefit people who use smartphones while wearing gloves in winter.
It is also relatively good for brief interactions, such as unlocking the phone or indicating “no” versus “yes”. But there are hints about limits: “people are not willing to use such interaction in case of more complex functionality like, for example, typing a message”.
Limits also arise in a paper called , presented by Ann-Marie Horcher at a symposium in 2014. It identifies another drawback of NoseTapping: “there were concerns about cleanliness”.
Despite those concerns, Horcher proposes the use of nose prints, in which a nose pressed against a smart screen could be scanned, its image then becoming “a biometric point of authentication”.
Horcher’s early experiments, however, identify shortcomings: “The lower sensitivity of the nose and no visual feedback made positioning of the nose for success problematic.”
No place like Neom
A new city planned for the Tabuk region of Saudi Arabia will be, say the planners, unlike other cities. One way it will be different is in its proportion. The city is designed to be only 200 metres wide, but 170 kilometres long.
Called “The Line”, this new city is part of a larger project called . Like most of Neom, The Line is mostly in the exciting planning-and-publicity stage of construction.
It may not have escaped your notice that The Line’s proportion, 170,000 to 200 – let’s call it the Neom ratio – differs from the ancient mathematical standard for beautiful proportion, the golden ratio.
The golden ratio’s exact value is an irrational number defined by a three-step recipe: take the square root of 5, add 1 to it, then divide by 2. Actuaries, when they loosen their ties and lapse into inexactitude, say the exact value is slightly more than 1.6.
The exact value of the Neom ratio is 850. This is slimness far exceeding that of the kilopedal millipede (Eumillipes persephone). At 95.7 millimetres long and 0.95 millimetres wide, the Australian millipede was recently documented in the study .
Nature is superabundant about patterns. Most simple patterns can be seen, if one pays attention, seemingly almost everywhere. The fruits of human manufacture are copious in the same way, with simple patterns recurring in various places. The Neom ratio can probably already be seen in the shape of many existing objects, and Feedback feels it would be intellectually exciting to identify and celebrate a few of these skinny standouts.
We invite you to help us amass a collection of the finest examples of the Neom ratio. What other physical objects have this same proportion, 170,000 to 200? Please tell us (being careful to supply clear examples, and to point to documentation thereof).
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