Weight-Shifting Mobiles: Automatic Balancing in Mobile Phones

摘要

This paper presents a new type of interaction support for mobile phones: Automatic balancing through weight-shift. It proposes that weight-shift in mobile phones could be used as to change the device's balancing behavior. The question that this technology can help us to explore is how our interaction with mobile phones in everyday life could change, once devices were able to actively change the way we hold them in our hands. Various levels of interaction are proposed: Balancing based on angular tilt and counter-balancing of button-clicks, and, for a future implementation, balancing, supported through grasp recognition. We report a user study that assessed in how much such a system may help users to balance the a device equipped with the proposed system. It concludes that actuated balancing may be helpful in mobile interactions, but that it needs to be designed carefully.