Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
we present our experiences with field deployments in a continuum between exploratory prototypes and
technology probes. We present benefits and drawbacks of different evaluation methods, and provide a
number of validated lessons from our deployments.
INTRODUCTION
at all. ContentCascade (Himanshu, Gossweiler,
& Milojicic, 2004) for example enables a user
to download content from a public display onto
her mobile phone using Bluetooth. The system
was tested in a small and informal user study us-
ing movie clips. More recent work by Maunder,
Marsden and Harper (2007) has investigated the
potential for supporting mobile phone interaction
with public displays in order to enable users to
select and download content without requiring
the user to keep their phone in a discoverable
state. Their approach required the user to take a
picture of the content screen that he/she wishes
to download and then send this picture back to
the public display server as a Bluetooth transfer,
thus providing the server with the user's phone's
Bluetooth MAC address. The server then per-
forms image recognition to determine the content
required by the user, which is then transferred via
Bluetooth to the user's phone. The system has
only been evaluated informally. Ballagas, Rohs,
Sheridan and Borchers (2005) present a survey of
interaction techniques with mobile phones, most
of which are used to generate input to a public
display. The majority of systems they present
have been evaluated only in lab studies. Rukzio,
Boll, Leichtenstern and Schmidt (2007) present
a comparison of different interaction techniques
with mobile phones, which have been evaluated
in the lab. Some systems use Bluetooth as a means
to detect the presence of people rather than as
a means to enable explicit interaction. Two ex-
amples of these systems are the BluScreen system
(Payne, David, Jennings, & Sharifi, 2006), which
links advertisement displays, agents bidding for
advertisement space and the detection of presence
via Bluetooth, and CityWare (Kindberg & Jones,
The use of mobile phones provides a range of new
and novel opportunities for supporting interaction
with public displays. Furthermore, such interac-
tion can help overcome some of the problems
associated with interactions with public displays.
An example is the potential inability of users to
interact with a touch screen display because of its
physical placement (e.g. inappropriate height for
a wheelchair user). Mobile phones can also sup-
port multi-user interaction and act as a means of
transferring content to a public display or display
content to the user's device. While these issues
have been investigated in lab studies it is not
clear how they will be appropriated in everyday
life. In this article we discuss our explorations
of some of these issues and present a number
of lessons as a result. The lessons are based on
our experiences with supporting both local and
remote mobile phone interaction with a number
of situated display deployments. Our research
approach involves a tight cycle where theoreti-
cal issues and understanding, developed through
reflection on empirical observations, are used to
design deployed systems that test and explore
theories. These deployed systems then create a
new context for observation of user behaviour
and thus lead to fresh insights, discoveries and
refinement of theoretical understanding.
RELATED WORK
There is surprisingly little published work relating
to the combination of mobile phones and situated
public displays, and the vast majority of these
systems have only been evaluated in the lab, if
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