Hello All,

The PhoneVortex is a little project that came to me during a coffee break and I couldn’t help but implement it. The basic idea is that by using a tabletop you can have a much bigger UI for your phone. Of course this is not a full-fledged implementation but it’s good enough to illustrate the concept. The long term objective is for tabletops, and many other platforms, not to be yet another thing we have to learn to program, but rather useful (situated?) extensions to our everyday objects (laptop, phone)

The PhoneVortex, if very rocky, is an step in that direction. I will probably not be working on it in the coming months as I am in the process of wrapping up my PhD thesis, but if I was this is a list of the things I would be focusing on:

– Efficient UI transfer implementation
– Scalable UI — that the tabletop user could increase the size of the client component
– Attach/Unattach
– Touch Integration (as you can see in the video I didn’t do this yet)
– iPhone and Android support
– Config-less (IP discovery UDP, registry server)
– Password support (single input password, dual input password, shared
input password)
– Sample application supporting multiple modes (phone mode – tabletop mode)

Resources

• Sicard, L., Tabard, A., Hincapié-Ramos, J.D. and Bardram, J.E. 2013. TIDE: Lightweight Device Composition for Enhancing Tabletop Environments with Smartphone Applications. In Human-Computer Interaction–INTERACT 2013. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. [pdf (1.98MB)]