/ Papers / Interacting with mobile services: an evaluation of camera-phones and visual tags
Journal paper in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing (vol 11 issue 2), Feb 2007
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Abstract. We present a study of using camera-phones and visual-tags to access mobile services. Firstly, a user-experience study is described in which participants were both observed learning to interact with a prototype mobile service and interviewed about their experiences. Secondly, a pointing-device task is presented in which quantitative data was gathered regarding the speed and accuracy with which participants aimed and clicked on visual-tags using camera-phones. We found that participants’ attitudes to visual-tag-based applications were broadly positive, although they had several important reservations about camera-phone technology more generally. Data from our pointing-device task demonstrated that novice users were able to aim and click on visual-tags quickly (well under 3 s per pointing-device trial on average) and accurately (almost all meeting our defined speed/accuracy tradeoff of 6% error-rate). Based on our findings, design lessons for camera-phone and visual-tag applications are presented.

Authors. Eleanor Toye Scott, Richard Sharp, Anil Madhavapeddy, Dave Scott, Eben Upton and Alan Blackwell

See Also. This publication was part of my Ubiquitous Interaction Devices project.

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Feb 2007. «» Journal paper on interacting with mobile services using camera-phones.