Collect&Drop: A Technique for Multi-Tag Interaction with Real World Objects and Information

Abstract

The advancement of Ubicomp technologies leverages mobile interaction with physical objects and facilitates ubiquitous access to information and services. This provides new opportunities for mobile interaction with the real world, but also creates new challenges regarding the complexity of mobile applications, their interaction design and usability. In order to take advantage of this potential beyond simple interaction with single objects and tags, this paper investigates mobile interaction with multiple objects, tags and associated information. It introduces Collect&Drop as a generic technique for Multi-Tag Interaction that supports the collection, storage and management of information from the real world as well as its usage with different services. This paper describes the concept, architecture and interaction design of Collect&Drop and presents a user study that evaluates its features.

Improving the accessibility of NFC/RFID-based mobile interaction through learnability and guidance

“…It is placed in the topright corner of the use-case poster (see grey outline in Figure 2) and is visually emphasized by a red border that also encapsulates a headline and a short text about how to interact with the tag (see Figure 4). Although users did not pay much attention to similar explanations in earlier studies (see [2]) the flashy coloring of the start-tag might catch their attention and direct it to the text. …”

“…While most of these and other examples take advantage of the simplicity of interacting with single tags, several applications already implement more complex physical interactions with multiple tags, shifting the focus of interaction from mobile devices to physical interfaces even further: Collect&Drop for example is a generic technique for Multi-Tag Interaction that is based on the typing of information from tags to increase their interoperability and to support their collection, combination and (re)use across different physical objects and applications [2]. Sanchez et al [12] use physical interfaces to operate multimediaplayers whose control-commands have been implemented with RFID-tags.…”

“…A preliminary study on the usability of NFC-based interaction investigated visual cues on tagged posters for mobile ticketing by numbering the different steps of the interaction process [2]. All subjects approved the numbering and a given order of interaction.…”

“…This use case is straightforward and most people can be expected to be familiar with it. It has been successfully used in previous studies (see [2]) and is flexible enough to evaluate mobile interaction with both single and multiple tags.…”

Adapting Interaction Obtrusiveness: Making Ubiquitous Interactions Less Obnoxious. A Model Driven Engineering approach

“…For example, users can access the services that are associated with an element either by pointing to the element, touching it, or scanning nearby elements with their mobile device. These are only some examples of the interaction techniques that have been defined for the interaction between users and their surroundings in the literature (Broll et al, 2008;Rukzio et al, 2006).…”