IDI's presentations are always interesting if you're into interaction design. Gaurav Chadha's thesis is:Restoring the role of Gestures in Mobile communication: How do we communicate emotional content through gestures over distance?

My goal is to explore the feasibility of designing a mobile telephone with an articulating case that can transmit subtle physical gestures to restore lost information back into the communication and thereby improve it. Some of these devices use articulating cases that include a physical ‘head’ that appears on the mobile phone screen (here prototyped using a Pocket PC). The virtual head would mimic the speaker's head gestures to add an additional channel of communication. (The eventual goal would be to add the listener's gestures as well). The movements of the head are detected by an accelerometer in the hands-free ear piece. The prototype uses one accelerometer, but if we use three, one for each plane of movement, then we can sense and mimic almost all of the real tilt, bend, twist and roll movements of human head gestures. These are then transmitted through a PIC/ PC to be represented as the head movements of a virtual character.