Transparent-display mobile devices have long been the focus on concept designs and visions of the future of interactive technologies. Taking the lead in commercializing such devices, some manufactures have release very basic phones such as the Lenove S800, without much success. Transparent mobiles present new challenges like where to locate the batteries or the perception of display colors as “washed out” (see color blending). In augmented-reality scenarios, transparent mobiles suffer from a serious challenged called “binocular parallax” which affects the overlaying on virtual content on the world. Moreover, it’s not clear what people would like this type of devices for.

At the upcoming ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems 2014 (DIS ’14), we will be presenting our work on tPads. tPads are transparent display 7” tablets which helped explore how transparent tablets can be used. We go beyond (or before?) the traditionally showcased mobile augmented reality scenarios and discuss everyday tasks such as multitasking and picture capture.

Citations:

• Hincapié-Ramos, J.D., Roscher, S., Büschel, W., Kister, U., Dachselt, R. and Irani, P. 2014. tPad: Designing Transparent-Display Mobile Interactions. In Proc. DIS ’14. ACM. Honorable Mention Award. [pdf (1.8MB)]
• Hincapié-Ramos, J.D., Roscher, S., Büschel, W., Kister, U., Dachselt, R. and Irani, P. 2014. cAR: Contact Augmented Reality with Transparent-Display Mobile Devices. In Proc. PerDis ’14. ACM. [pdf (1.14MB)]

Collaborators

• Sophie Roscher
• Wolfgang Büschel
• Ulrike Kister
• Raimund Dachselt
• Pourang Irani