Using Mobile Phones to Spontaneously Authenticate and Interact with Multi-Touch Surfaces

The development of FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection) technology has enabled the construction of large-scale, low-cost, multi-touch displays. These displays—capable of sensing fingers, hands, and whole arms—have great potential for exploring complex data in a natural manner and easily scale in size and the number of simultaneous users. In this context, access and security problems arise if a larger team operates the surface with different access rights. The team members might have different levels of authority or specific roles, which determines what functions they are allowed to access via the multi-touch surface. In this paper we present first concepts and strategies to use a mobile phone to spontaneously authenticate and interact with sub-regions of a large-scale multi-touch wall.