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Exploring casual point-and-tilt interactions for mobile geo-blogging

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Abstract

People record and share their experiences through text, audio and video. Increasingly they do this blogging from mobile devices. We illustrate a novel, mobile, low interaction cost approach to support the creation of a rich record of journeys made and places encountered: by pointing and tilting a mobile, users indicate their interests in a location. We built three mobile prototypes to explore the approach—the first one combines gestures and visual map feedback; the second provides a simpler visual interface; the third supports eyes-free interaction, allowing the user to simply point-and-tilt, with no visual display required. We describe two field studies undertaken to understand the value of the interaction styles afforded, then continue with a further user study to assess the interaction speed and accuracy between these interaction methods. We present the results of these studies and raise issues relevant to their design and to the wider class of devices and services concerned with mobile spatial information access.

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Notes

  1. http://www.nokia.com/lifeblog

  2. http://www.google.com/psearch

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Acknowledgments

This work is funded by EPSRC project EP/E042171/1, undertaken in collaboration with colleagues at Glasgow University: Roderick Murray-Smith, Stephen Brewster, John Williamson, Steven Strachan and Craig Stewart. Stephen Hughes provided the SHAKE devices used in our user studies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Future Interaction Technology Lab, Computer Science Department, Swansea University, Swansea, SA2 8PP, UK

    Simon Robinson, Parisa Eslambolchilar & Matt Jones

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  1. Simon Robinson
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  2. Parisa Eslambolchilar
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  3. Matt Jones
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Correspondence to Simon Robinson.

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Robinson, S., Eslambolchilar, P. & Jones, M. Exploring casual point-and-tilt interactions for mobile geo-blogging. Pers Ubiquit Comput 14, 363–379 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-009-0236-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-009-0236-5

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