Mobile projectors versus mobile displays

Abstract

Mobile projectors are gaining momentum, with many pocket sized products reaching the market and projector phones being close to production. Although the usefulness of such devices for entertainment, collaboration as well as many other tasks is obvious, it is not yet clear how their limitations in terms of image quality, brightness and jitter due to hand motion might affect performance. To answer these questions, we conduct two experiments based on traditional psychophysical methods. Using a visual search and a text reading study we compare task performance on a mobile phone display and a mobile projector. In addition, we examine whether performance is affected when devices are handheld rather than placed on a stable surface. We find that the perceived task difficulty is worse on the mobile projector cases for both tasks, while only in the visual search task leads to quantitatively worse performance. In contrast, we find that the stability of the projection plays no role in task performance but tasks performed on a handheld device may be perceived as harder to complete.