Multi-device Interaction for Content Sharing

Abstract

The exponentially growing trend of multi-device ownership creates both a need and an opportunity to migrate content and on-going user tasks from one device to another of the same user, which is more suited for the current context of use or the task at hand. One intuitive interaction method for enabling this transfer is that of a virtual display that combines the physical screens of two or more participating devices. In this work, we propose a novel technique to create a virtual screen for multi-device interaction, multimedia-sharing and collaborative work use case. To this end, participating devices need to know their relative proximity and orientation. We exploit the rich video information from the back facing camera of a device for calibration, so to enable a natural form of virtual desktop creation, without requiring any extra equipment or special environments. An extensive experimental evaluation determined the feasibility of the presented approach for seamless multi-device communications.