Spatial co-location for device association
Ming Ki Chong, Fahim Kawsar, Hans W. Gellersen · 2011
Device association is one of the most common interaction primitives used in today's mobile device space. Yet, the existing approaches rely on traditional (e.g., sharing a pass key across devices, etc.) or tangible methods (e.g., bumping devices together, shaking with a similar pattern, etc.) and are mostly limited to pairing two devices. In this paper, we present "GroupTap", an intuitive and secure device association mechanism for multiple devices. It leverages spatial co-location features while ensuring tangibility and user centric control for better user experience. The fact that mobile devices need to be physically co-located for forming an association, the spatial co-location could be used as a trigger for initiating the association. For conforming co-location, we exploit connected physical objects and simple tapping interaction, i.e., devices need to tap one or multiple connected physical objects (placed in a particular location) to convey association request. We envisage that this approach is simple, rapid, efficient and would yield a superior user experience. We discuss the design rationales and present technical details of GroupTap in this paper.