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Bridging the physical and virtual worlds by local connectivity-based physical selection

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Abstract

The prevalent visions of ambient intelligence emphasise natural interaction between user and functions and services embedded in the environment or available through mobile devices. In these scenarios the physical and virtual worlds seamlessly gear into each other, making crossing the border between these worlds natural or even invisible to the user. The bottleneck in reaching these scenarios appear in the natural mapping between the physical objects and their virtual counterparts. The emergence of local connectivity in mobile devices opens possibilities for implementing novel user interface paradigms to enhance this mapping. We present physical selection paradigm for implementing an intuitive human technology interaction for mobile devices. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of the paradigm we implemented two experimental set-ups using commercially available smart phones with IrDA connectivity. The experiments involved selecting a website by physically pointing at its symbol and making a phone call by pointing at an icon representing the person to be called. In tentative user experiments the physical selection method was more time-efficient and it was perceived more positively by the users than a conventional method.

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Notes

  1. The term virtual world meaning here loosely all the computerised services and digital information available to the user.

  2. By natural interaction we mean that the interaction is intuitive with minimum amount of actions and time required from the user, and resulting to a positive user experience.

  3. Potentially, with some technologies and in the presence of a multitude of tags, there may be occasions that not all the tags successfully reply to the scan, for example due to communication channel overload. This would represent a problem to the UI paradigm unless there is some way of warning the mobile device of the unread tags, in which case the scan could be repeated until all tags are successfully read.

  4. Barcode reading software for mobile phones, see e.g. www.geracap.com.

  5. Long-range electromagnetic technologies, such as bluetooth or RFID (UHF), can be used for PointMe paradigm, when they are equipped with a photo sensor which is activated by a light beam from the user’s device. This kind of implementation can be regarded as a ‘hybrid solution’.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank B.Sc.(Eng.) Sanna Boström for implementing the phone call trial with the two elderly test subjects.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. VTT Electronics, P.O. Box 1100, 90571, Oulu, Finland

    Heikki Ailisto, Lauri Pohjanheimo & Esko Strömmer

  2. VTT Information Technology, P.O. Box 1206, 33720, Tampere, Finland

    Pasi Välkkynen, Timo Tuomisto & Ilkka Korhonen

Authors
  1. Heikki Ailisto
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  2. Lauri Pohjanheimo
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  3. Pasi Välkkynen
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  4. Esko Strömmer
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  5. Timo Tuomisto
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  6. Ilkka Korhonen
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Correspondence to Heikki Ailisto.

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Ailisto, H., Pohjanheimo, L., Välkkynen, P. et al. Bridging the physical and virtual worlds by local connectivity-based physical selection. Pers Ubiquit Comput 10, 333–344 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-005-0057-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-005-0057-0

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