Physical mobile interactions : mobile devices as pervasive mediators for interactions with the real world

So far, mobile devices have mainly been used for interactions between the user, the device and the used service without considering the context of use. However, during the last years we have seen a huge interest in industry and academia in using mobile devices for interactions with things, places and people in the real world, termed physical mobile interactions in this thesis. Until now there has been no comprehensive analysis of these interaction techniques and no user studies have been conducted to analyze when which interaction technique is preferred by which users. Furthermore there is no comprehensive framework available which can be reused by application developers to integrate such interactions into their applications, and no specific methods and best practices have been reported that can be of use when developing physical mobile interactions and applications. This dissertation presents the first comprehensive analysis and classification of physical mobile interactions. Furthermore a mature framework was developed that provides various implementations of four different interaction techniques. These four physical mobile interaction techniques were then used in five different prototypes and analysed in five different user studies. The results concern the advantages and disadvantages of these interaction techniques as seen by potential users. This work also reports experiences, guidelines, methods and best practices that simplify the process of developing physical mobile interactions and applications. Furthermore this dissertation provides an analysis of privacy aspects in mobile interactions with public displays, presents the novel interaction technique rotating compass and the first concept of using the mobile device for direct touch-based interaction with dynamic displays.