Touch & Interact: Applied to a Tourist Guide Prototype.

An ongoing issue for mobile application developers is the limited output capabilities of mobile phones [1]. For this reason, current mobile phones may still fail to fully address the requirements of map, multimedia and information browsing applications. This paper presents Touch & Interact: an NFC (Near Field Communication) interaction technique that utilizes the capabilities of mobile phones and the screen size of public displays. Using the Touch & Interact interaction technique, an NFC phone can touch the display at any position in order to perform selections. During the interaction, both the phone display and public display share the display space. The shared display space is especially useful for separation of public and private information by presenting sensitive information on the phone display. In addition to an auxiliary display, the phone provides extra modalities (e.g. joystick and keypad), storage and additional feedback (audio and haptic). A tourist guide application was developed based on Touch & Interact in order to show the advantages of this interaction technique. Touch & Interact is influenced by traditional desktop interactions and interactions extending the traditional desktop environment such as pick-and-drop