We are looking forward to the 14th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. This year, the conference will be in Vaasa, Finland. We are happy to contribute our work on multitouch interaction on the handlebar of motorbikes. The paper will be presented by Marvin Reuter. The work resulted from our HoDI project together with brehmer mechatronics. The projects investigates new touch-based interaction and gestures for using apps and services while riding a motorbike.
Hands on the Bars: A Multimodal Gesture Elicitation Study for Motorcycle Handlebars Comparing Visual, Tactile, and Conceptual Consensus
The increasing digitalization of motorcycle cockpits presents a safety-critical challenge: when interacting with apps and services for communication, entertainment or navigation, one has to take away the hands from the steering handlebar. Hence, such secondary tasks compete with the primary task of riding the motorcycle. We address this conflict by systematically eliciting, structuring, and evaluating a user-defined and safe gesture set for touch interactions on the motorcycle handlebar. A Gesture Elicitation Study was conducted with 20 participants in an experimental setup. Gesture proposals were captured multimodally using video and capacitive sensors. The analysis of user consensus was performed on three levels: conceptual (based on a developed taxonomy), visual-algorithmic (based on hand trajectories), and tactile-algorithmic (based on capacitive sensor data). The main result reveals a discrepancy between the analysis methods: only the visual consensus on motor execution correlated significantly with users’ subjective ratings. This work provides two main contributions: first, it delivers the methodological insight that concrete motor execution is a crucial factor in deriving user-defined gesture sets. Second, it presents an initial, empirically validated gesture set as a foundation for designing future interaction concepts in the motorcycle context.
 | : Hands on the Bars: A Multimodal Gesture Elicitation Study for Motorcycle Handlebars Comparing Visual, Tactile, and Conceptual Consensus. In: Proceedings of the 14th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI ’26), ACM, 2026. |
We also have a repo on GitHub with some material for building the prototype and running the study.