ModControl – Mobile Phones as a Versatile Interaction Device for Large Screen Applications

Abstract

Abstract. Large, public displays are increasingly popular in today's society. For the most part, however, these displays are purely used for information or multimedia presentation, without the possibility of interaction for viewers. On the other hand, personal mobile devices are becoming more and more ubiquitous. Though there are efforts to combine large screens with mobile devices, the approaches are mostly focused on mobiles as control devices, or they are fitted to specific applications. In this paper, we present the ModControl framework, a configurable, modular communication structure that enables large screen applications to connect with personal mobile devices and request a set of configurable modules, utilizing the device as a personalized mobile interface. The main application can easily make use of the highly sophisticated interaction features provided by modern mobile phones. This facilitates new, interactive appealing visualizations that can be actively controlled with an intuitive, unified interface by single or multiple users.

Towards An Understanding of Mobile Touch Navigation in a Stereoscopic Viewing Environment for 3D Data Exploration

“…Similarly, zooming is often done using a pinching gesture on the touch surface. Others simulate buttons/joysticks [24], [50] or use the mobile device as a touch-sensitive handle/widget that is virtually extended into the scene for manipulations [44], [48]. One special form of interaction is the use of a touch-sensitive mobile device whose surface is mapped to an arbitrarily shaped virtual surface in 3D [58] such that touch interactions can be used to manipulate 3D objects.…”

The cost of display switching

“…Some prototypes demonstrate varied applications where the mobile device is used for both input and output [28,15,18,6,27,9], or exclusively for input [2,18,23]. LensMouse [33] is also an example of this kind of configuration motivated instead as enhanced input device for personal computers.…”

“…Such configuration has several perceived advantages, including: a) the large display might supplement the screen real estate lacking in the mobile display, b) input can still be provided through the mobile device, which is familiar to, proximate to and easily manipulated by the user, and c)implementation of this kind of configuration is already possible with a currently available infrastructure (e.g., network-connected digital signage [18]). Many research projects (e.g., [4,6,9,10,11], and numerous new commercial products (e.g., Wii U, Apple Remote App, multidevice Scrabble) point to a future where we might expect operating system-level support for multi-display ecosystems with seamless interaction across opportunistically available displays.…”