Mobile devices have acceleratedly penetrated into our daily lives. Though they were originally designed as a communication tool or for personal use, and due to the rapid availability of wireless network technologies, people have begun to use mobile devices for supporting collaborative work and learning. There is, however, a serious problem in mobile devices related to their user interfaces. In this paper, we try to alleviate the problem and propose intuitive techniques for information transfer, which is one of the typical usages of mutually-connected computers. Our system, Toss-It, enables a user to send information from the user's PDA to other electronic devices with a "toss" or "swing" action, like a user would toss a ball or deal cards to others. The implementation of Toss-It consists of three principle parts-gesture recognition, location recognition, and file transfer. We especially describe the details of gesture recognition and location recognition. We then evaluate the practicability and usability of Toss-It through the experiments. We also discuss user scenarios describing how Toss-It can support users' collaborative activities.

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In recent years, mobile devices have rapidly penetrated into our daily lives. Several drawbacks of mobile devices have been mentioned so far, such as their limited computational capability, small screen real estate, and, so on, as compared with notebook or desktop computers. However, by fully utilizing the most notable feature of mobile devices, that is, mobility, we can explore possibilities for a new user interface of the devices. In this paper, we use and propose intuitive information transfer techniques for them, which could not be achieved with notebook or desktop computers. By using the system called Toss-It, a user can send information from the user's PDA to other electronic devices with a "toss" or "swing" action, as the user would toss a ball or deals cards to others. We have developed a circuit board designed to be attached to a PDA and algorithms for recognizing "toss" and "swing" actions. Preliminary user studies of Toss-It indicated that it could correctly identify receivers of information by "toss" or "swing" actions. Our research project is in progress, and this paper describes the current status of the project by focusing on issues related to HCI (Human Computer Interaction). We will discuss about several critical issues to be investigated in our studies.

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