Disc-O-Share is a new way to share media effortlessly amongst a group of collocated people. It is designed for public and semi-public settings and allows people located around a table, for example in a café or meeting room, to exchange media items with simple spatial actions.
Mobile devices, such as mobile phones and music players, today have become ubiquitous both in business and leisure environments. It is hence only natural that many everyday activities now involve the use of these devices. The activity of media sharing, for example, frequently occurs while people sit around a table. For example, at the end of a meeting, participants may want to agree on a date for a follow-up meeting, which might involve group members exploring their personal calendar on their personal devices. Similarly, media such as ringtones or photographs might be casually shared in a group of people sat around a table in a café by transmitting the files via Bluetooth from one mobile phone to the other.
The basic idea underlying Disc-O-Share is to use spatial proximity regions around mobile devices placed on a table. Intuitive spatial actions, such as entering or leaving such regions with another device, triggers application-specific functions such as offering or accepting media items. A key benefit of using proximity regions to facilitate interaction and coordination is the ease of integrating multiple participants at the same time.
Disc-O-Share uses visual markers to track the location of mobile phones. These markers are displayed at the top of the phone screen. In the prototype we use an external camera and projector but the system could also be implemented on mobile phones with built-in nano-projectors.
Two successful user studies have shown that Disc-O-Share is fun to use and very easy to learn. The test users gave very positive ratings in favor of the system. Disc-O-Share can also speed up media sharing and enables users to share media items with several people at the same time. Our approach reduced the task completion time by 43% and was rated as superior in comparison to other established techniques.
While it is possible to perform media exchange activities with today's technology, the procedure users must follow can be quite difficult and cumbersome. They may face technical challenges (for example having to establish network connections) as well as problems resulting from limitations of the available technology (for example mapping device names to people or having to verbally synchronize with other group members). Disc-O-Share solves these challenges by replacing them with intuitive spatial actions. Moreover, media sharing via Bluetooth is restricted to sequential or pairwise action and thus tends to split up group activity. Disc-O-Share allows a group of people to enjoy media sharing together as a whole.
Disc-O-Share is part of a collaboration between Michael Rohs Deutsche Telekom Laboratories and Christian Kray at the University of Newcastle.
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| To activate Disc-O-Share for a phone, just place it on the table. | Once placed on the table, the two sharing discs appear around the phone. |
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| The green disc is for downloading an image shared by the phone in its centre; the yellow disc is for previewing a shared image. We use a marker displayed on the phone screen to track its location. | Moving another phone into the yellow disc allows it to preview the image currently shared by the phone in the centre. |
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| Once inside the yellow disc, a phone displays a thumbnail preview of the photo shared by the centre phone. | Multiple phones can be inside the yellow disc to preview the shared image on their displays. |
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| When the user of the centre phone selects another photo, all the phones inside the yellow disc instantaneously show a preview of this new photo... | Moving a phone into the green disc triggers a download of the photo currently shared by the centre phone. |
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| Moving a phone out of the yellow disc stops the preview without downloading the shared photo. | In 2 user studies, people liked using Disc-O-Share and learnt it quickly. |
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| They could even use it easily without projection: they quickly learnt where the invisible discs were located. |