MilkyWay: A Toolbox for Prototyping Collaborative Mobile-Based Interaction Techniques

Beside traditional multitouch input, mobile devices provide various possibilities to interact in a physical, device-based manner due to their built-in hardware. Applying such interaction techniques allows for sharing content easily, e.g. by literally pouring content from one device into another, or accessing device functions quickly, e.g. by facing down the device to mute incoming calls. So-called mobile-based interaction techniques are characterized by movements and concrete positions in real spaces. Even though such interactions may provide many advantages in everyday life, they have limited visibility in interaction design due to the complexity of sensor processing. Hence, mobile-based interactions are often integrated, if any, at late design stages. To support testing interactive ideas in early design stages, we propose MilkyWay, a toolbox for prototyping collocated collaborative mobile-based interaction techniques. MilkyWay includes an API and a mobile application. It enables easily building up mobile interactive spaces between multiple collocated devices as well as prototyping interactions based on device sensors by a programming-by-demonstration approach. Appropriate sensors are selected and combined automatically to increase tool support. We demonstrate our approach using a proof of concept implementation of a collaborative Business Model Canvas (BMC) application