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

Comments:


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

Summary
This paper discusses a technique the authors term 'PhoneTouch', which allows users to use their phones as a pointer or stylus on an interactive table. The table is similar to a light table, but uses a projector underneath instead of a light. Contact with the table is determined using a camera. Images are ran though several filters, so that the program can easily verify if a phone or a finger touched the table. Phones communicate with the table using Bluetooth.

Discussion
Although the image processing used in this project has potential, I think the idea to use phones is poor. . You could easily use any other object to preform these tasks, including your fingers. Of course the paper does explain the use of fingers and phones together to form a more complex method of communication, but I don't really see the need. You can preform just about any task necessary on a normal touch screen without requiring multiple types of pointers, and even if you did, finding a way to simply distinguish different fingers from each other would be much more useful. A large part of the project was also displaying the contents of the phone on the table. This is a good idea, but it does not require you to use your phone as a pointer. At its most basic level, this project is just a computer wirelessly reading data off of phones and displaying it on a touch screen, which is far from innovative.

As I mentioned previously, I do think that the projection style interface using a camera to check for contact has potential though. Touch screen are still expensive, especially large ones, and this technology could be used to make large tables that would be useful in conferences, or even just dynamic user interfaces. For example, you could design a table that would function as a keyboard and mouse, but could double as an additional display/touchscreen as well.