Supporting face to face collaboration through dynamic arrays of mobile devices

Abstract

Nowadays, it is difficult to find applications for mobile devices that allow co-located users to carry out transitions between individual and collaborative work modes. In fact, most of the single-user applications cannot be used to work with others, and vice-versa. The main contribution of this work is the design and implementation of a development support that allows programmers to extend their applications with functions to accomplish such work mode transitions, by relying on coupling and decoupling gestures on heterogeneous mobile devices to respectively do and undo irregular arrays of such devices. The proposed development support has been implemented for Android platforms following a P2P architecture.