A Novel Interaction Technique for Transferring Files between Smartphones and Public Displays

Abstract

In recent years, public displays (PDs) have become an increasingly significant mechanism of mass communication. So far, many of PDs do not provide a means of interaction acting only act as output devices that present information. On the other hand, smartphones have become increasingly popular due to their number of users, inherent properties and power. It has been argued that digital information is required for most meetings, whether formal or informal. With technological improvement and the growing of the ubiquity of both PDs and smartphones, streaming data between devices should be done smoothly in formal or informal meetings. While many possibilities exist for communication between such devices, file sharing in these scenarios is still restricted. These solutions also focus only on new mechanisms for interaction with PDs and ignore PDs’ primary function of displaying information. To solve this problem, we present a novel technique that allows users to transfer different types of files while preserving the security of these files. The technique will be particularly used to transfer files from smartphones to PDs in various kinds of meetings. The system combines both traditional uses of PDs (such as displaying announcements) and interactive ways of giving real-time presentations by uploading files, marking important parts of pages and writing notes. The findings imply that a majority of users are ready to use the system. Furthermore, the systems's performance evaluation results are very encouraging and reveal that the deployed tool is an effective method that can be a reasonable alternative to using projectors.