ModControl - Mobile phones as a versatile interaction device for large screen applications

Abstract

Large, public displays are increasingly popular in today's society. For the most part, however, these displays are purely used for information or multimedia presentation, without the possibility of interaction for viewers. On the other hand, personal mobile devices are becoming more and more ubiquitous. Though there are efforts to combine large screens with mobile devices, the approaches are mostly focused on mobiles as control devices, or they are fitted to specific applications. In this paper, we present the ModControl framework, a configurable, modular communication structure that enables large screen applications to connect with personal mobile devices and request a set of configurable modules, utilizing the device as a personalized mobile interface. The main application can easily make use of the highly sophisticated interaction features provided by modern mobile phones. This facilitates new, interactive appealing visualizations that can be actively controlled with an intuitive, unified interface by single or multiple users. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.