Physical Mobile Interactions: Mobile Devices as Pervasive Mediators for Interactions with the Real World

So far, mobile devices have mainly been used for interactions
between the user, the device and the used service without
considering the context of use. However, during the last years we
have seen a huge interest in industry and academia in using mobile
devices for interactions with things, places and people in the real
world, termed physical mobile interactions in this thesis. Until
now there has been no comprehensive analysis of these interaction
techniques and no user studies have been conducted to analyze when
which interaction technique is preferred by which users.
Furthermore there is no comprehensive framework available which can
be reused by application developers to integrate such interactions
into their applications, and no specific methods and best practices
have been reported that can be of use when developing physical
mobile interactions and applications. This dissertation presents
the first comprehensive analysis and classification of physical
mobile interactions. Furthermore a mature framework was developed
that provides various implementations of four different interaction
techniques. These four physical mobile interaction techniques were
then used in five different prototypes and analysed in five
different user studies. The results concern the advantages and
disadvantages of these interaction techniques as seen by potential
users. This work also reports experiences, guidelines, methods and
best practices that simplify the process of developing physical
mobile interactions and applications. Furthermore this dissertation
provides an analysis of privacy aspects in mobile interactions with
public displays, presents the novel interaction technique rotating
compass and the first concept of using the mobile device for direct
touch-based interaction with dynamic displays.