Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Paper Reading #10 - PhoneTouch: A Technique for Direct Phone Interaction on Surfaces

Comments
Joe Cabrera
Keith Farinella

Reference Info:
PhoneTouch: A Technique for Direct Phone Interaction on Surfaces
Dominik Schmidt, Fadi Chehimi, Enrico Rukzio, Hans Gellersen
UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology

Summary:
This paper discusses using a phone on a touch table surface as a stylus or pointer in order to interact. Several phones can be placed on the table's surface and read. This allows for the sharing of media and interaction. The issues that arise with this technology though, is the insufficient accuracy of the table's ability to distinguish between a phone and a finger.  An example given is when a phone has some sore of rubbery or soft covering for protection, the table may confuse it with a finger.



Discussion:
I find it a bit confusing to use your phone as a stylus. It doesn't seem natural to use an object when you can just use your fingers. And is there long term damage done to the phone from using one's phone as a pointer, scraping it across a table?

2 comments:

  1. The idea seems interesting, the the table itself can access media stored on the phone. If you could say, drag pictures "off" of the phone using multitouch, that could be a fun an interesting use case. However, if you're just dragging your phone around instead of a finger, it's a somewhat pointless system.

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  2. I could see many useful applications of this, if the system could be used to interact with the phone on the table, such as dragging data to or from the phone and manipulating it on a larger scale. But I agree, if you're just using the phone as a stylus, it seems that it would just be easier to use your finger, and less harmful to the phone.

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