Sweep-Shake

Abstract

In this article we describe the Sweep-Shake system, a novel, low interaction cost approach to supporting the spontaneous discovery of geo-located information. By sweeping a mobile device around their environment, users browse for interesting information related to points of interest. We built a mobile haptic prototype which encourages the user to explore their surroundings to search for location information, helping them discover this by providing directional vibrotactile feedback. Once potential targets are selected, the interaction is extended to offer an hierarchy of information levels with a simple method for filtering and selecting desired types of data for each geo-tagged location. We describe and motivate our approach and present a short field trial to situate our design in a real environment, followed by a more detailed user study that compares it against an equivalent visual-based system.