MobiSpray: Mobile Phone as Virtual Spray Can for Painting BIG Anytime Anywhere on Anything

Abstract

A B S T R A C TThis paper presents MobiSpray, a novel interactive art tool for creating ubiquitous ephemeral digital art. The mobile phone is employed as a virtual spray can to spray dabs of digital paint onto the physical environment via large-scale projections. The gesture-based control of the mobile phone provides a natural pointing mechanism for the virtual spray can. Experiences from extensive field use around the world testify in favor of a successful design. Most importantly, MobiSpray liberates and empowers the artist to change the environment via large-scale artistic expressions.

Supporting distributed private and public user interfaces in urban environments

“…Furthermore, distributed interfaces comprising of large displays or projection surfaces and mobile phones have been employed to stimulate audience participation [23] or to create artistic expressions [24,25]. Mostly these prototypes, while contributing to user interface research, approach the DUI paradigm via a short-term deployment in a controlled semi-public environment.…”

Multi-user interaction on media facades through live video on mobile devices

“…However, such input techniques may hinder multi-user scenarios due to the required virtual pointer. MobiSpray uses a world-in-miniature interface to allow for "spraying" color on various projected surfaces using the mobile device's accelerometers [9]. Recent advantages in mobile augmented reality allow absolute pointing on displays [7].…”

“…The low resolution facade of the ARS Electronica Center 1 (each window or pixel is about one by three meters in size) used for our prototypes lowers this number even more. Techniques that use a world-inminiature representation (e.g., MobiSpray [9]) overcome this limitation at the expense of macro attention shifts between both the mobile and target display (here: facade).…”

LightSet

“…At the same time Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers began to exploit the interaction opportunities between user and building, and hence bridge the gap between interface and architecture [32]. They, for example, investigated the use of adaptive mobile interfaces or stationary sensors to provide various interaction opportunities [2,3,4,29]. However, those emerging technological possibilities can also provoke denial by users [21].…”