PhoneLens: A Low-Cost, Spatially Aware, Mobile-Interaction Device

Large paper sheets are still the most preferred medium used by engineers to inspect remote sites. However, these paper documents are hard to modify and retrieve. This paper presents a novel, spatially aware, mobile system (called PhoneLens) which combines the merits of paper documents and mobile devices. It augments paper documents with digital information. Different from previous approaches, PhoneLens is inexpensive. It includes two infrared LEDs (i.e., light-emitting diodes), one Wiimote, and one Android device. Based on the hardware setting, we developed an efficient spatial-tracking algorithm to record the movement of a mobile device within a large workspace. Our approach is robust and applicable to various scenarios. PhoneLens provides different functions to browse a multivalent document, such as browsing different layers, searching annotations, and zooming. We conducted a controlled study that compared the participants' performance with PhoneLens against a traditional paper-based method with a multivalent paper document at a significance level of p <; 0.05. The following results were obtained from the study: 1) PhoneLens was significantly more efficient than the paper-based method on search and measurement tasks; 2) PhoneLens was rated higher on subjects' overall experience than the paper-based method; and 3) the usefulness of the training on PhoneLens was positively correlated with subjects' browsing efficiency.