Phone proxies: effortless content sharing between smartphones and interactive surfaces

Abstract

We present Phone Proxies, a technique for effortless content sharing between mobile devices and interactive surfaces. In such a scenario, users often have to perform a lengthy setup process before the actual exchange of content can take place. Phone Proxies uses a combination of custom NFC (near-field communication) tags and optical markers on the interactive surface to reduce the user interaction required for this setup process to an absolute minimum. We discuss two use cases: "pickup", in which the user wants to transfer content from the surface onto their device, and "share", in which the user transfers device content to the surface for shared viewing. We introduce three possible implementations of Phone Proxies for each of these use cases and discuss their respective advantages.