I’ve recently taken the time to get a paper published on a technique I started development on as part of my final year undergraduate studies several years ago. The technique uses a small number of user inputs on a touch-screen which relate to the known position of landmarks in an environment to determine the position of an interface. The publication details a study investigating how big of an impact user’s accuracy has on the technique.

The technique was developed as a low-tech method of quickly obtaining the location of touch-screen interfaces which may be routinely moved around an environment, such as tablets in a classroom. Allowing the devices which the interfaces belong to know their location can be useful for co-located activities such as the network flick technique discussed in my previous publication.

I took the opportunity to update the literature surrounding the technique and perform a more detailed analysis of the data from the original study investigating how the error in user’s judgement of direction and orientation impacts the accuracy of positions calculated by the technique.

The article is open-source and available for viewing here:

J. A. McNaughton, T. Crick, A. S. Hatch., Determining Device Position through Minimal User Input, Human-Centric Computing and Information Sciences, Vol. 7 (1), pp. 1–15, 2017

Special thanks to Tom Crick and Andy Hatch for helping get the paper written and supporting me in carrying out the original study respectively.  And also special thanks to Andrew Joyce-Gibbons who motivated me into getting this done.