Touch and interact: touch-based interaction of mobile phones with displays

The limited screen size and resolution of current mobile devices can still be problematic for map, multimedia and browsing applications. In this paper we present Touch & Interact: an interaction technique in which a mobile phone is able to touch a display, at any position, to perform selections. Through the combination of the output capabilities of the mobile phone and display, applications can share the entire display space. Moreover, there is potential to realize new interaction techniques between the phone and display. For example, select & pick and select & drop are interactions whereby entities can be picked up onto the phone or dropped onto the display. We report the implementation of Touch & Interact, its usage for a tourist guide application and experimental comparison. The latter shows that the performance of Touch & Interact is comparable to approaches based on a touch screen; it also shows the advantages of our system regarding ease of use, intuitiveness and enjoyment