A Natural User Interface to Facilitate Information Sharing Among Mobile Devices in a Co-located Environment

Abstract

Existing information sharing methods used by mobile devices require the user to repeat a series of steps to share one or more selected files with another individual. Natural User Interfaces (NUIs) focus on the reuse of existing knowledge to provide a more intuitive solution to existing user interfaces. The aim of this paper is to discuss the design of a NUI application, called MotionShare, to provide a solution to support information sharing among co-located mobile devices. MotionShare does not rely on any additional technologies to assist in positioning of the devices, unlike other existing systems. An example is the use of an external camera to determine the position of devices in an environment. MotionShare requires an initial calibration setup to calculate the approximate position and orientation of all the mobile devices in the environment. The approximate position was determined using Bluetooth, which was identified by conducting several experiments. The embedded sensors on mobile devices were used to determine the orientation of these devices. Focus groups were conducted to identify the most appropriate NUI gestures to utilise the position and orientation information. The results of these focus groups and systems selected from literature were compared. Based on this comparison, the most relevant NUI interaction techniques were then implemented to support information sharing among these devices. An analytical evaluation investigated the accuracy of device positioning and gesture recognition, where the results were positive. The empirical evaluation investigated any usability issues. The results of the empirical evaluation showed high levels of user satisfaction and that participants preferred touch gestures to point gestures.