Mouse on the move

A mouse, a keyboard, a Nunchuk - these are everyday gadgets that we use to interact with computers. Now a group of scientists want to add mobile phones to that list. As team member Dr Nick Pears explains ‘you don’t want the interface to get in the way of what you need.’ The obvious solution when you’re on the move is to use the phone in your pocket.

Based at the University of York, Dr Pears enjoys discussing the future of human-computer interfaces over a coffee with colleagues Dr Patrick Olivier and Daniel Jackson. Describing how it started he says, ‘Patrick conceived the idea of phones and computers interacting. I came up with the solution and Dan built the system.’

Personalized access The phone is more than just a mouse. He says, ‘the next generation of phones, smartphones, will have touch sensitive screens, you have a little bit of the computer screen on your phone. It is like a mouse because you can use it like a 3D cursor but you could touch the display on your mobile phone screen and interact that way as well.’ The team see their system making human interaction with public information systems more personal.

LearnEnglish Science activities Why not do a language activity based on this cubed story, Pocket cursor ? You can double-click on any word on this page for a dictionary definition. Source : British Council, Cubed

Display registration for device interaction Nick Pears, Patrick Olivier and Dan Jackson

In this project, we use a mobile phone to view a PC screen and we can control many interactions between the devices. It has been reported in ’New Scientist’ in January 2008, which made the top ten articles in the ACM TechNews alert, and it has been reported in many press articles and on many websites around the world.

 Click here for a video demonstration of the photo montage exercise. (Photos have to be translated, scaled and rotated on a screen, using the mobile phone.)

 Click here for a video demonstration of the house drawing exercise. (Draw a house with a mobile phone.)

 Click here for a video demonstration of a "write-through" exercise on a PDA. (A circle, square, triangle and diamond are drawn around the markers on the PDA and appear in the correct places on the PC screen. Videoed using a mobile phone, so apologies for the poor quality footage).

 A powerpoint presentation of the VISAPP’08 talk.
 The VISAPP’08 paper (pdf).
 Motivation : why use display registration ? (doc). Source : Docteur Nick Pears, Patrick Olivier et Dan Jackson : users.cs.york.ac