Touch & Interact

Abstract

Touch & Interact is an interaction technique which combines mobile phones and public displays. The motivation for the project is to overcome the intrinsic output limitations of mobile phones. Touch & Interact extends the phone output to a public display allowing both screens to share the display space. This concept is especially useful for separating public and private data – only showing private data on the phone display. During interaction, the phone is used as a stylus for the public display and can touch the display at any location. The phone also lends additional capabilities to interactions by providing storage capabilities, additional feedback (e.g. audio and haptic) and input modalities (e.g. keypad and joystick). The underlying technology supporting Touch & Interact is Near Field Communication (NFC); the dynamic display includes a mesh of NFC tags which can be interacted with using an NFC phone. A tourist map application was used to explore and test Touch & Interact in an environment with rich functionality.