The Fusion of an Ultrasonic and Spatially Aware System in a Mobile-Interaction Device

Over the past four decades, the prophecy from computer pundits and prognosticators pointed to the looming arrival of the paperless office era. However, forty years later, physical paper documents are still playing a significant role due to the ease of use, superior readability, and availability. The drawbacks of paper sheets are that they are hard to modify and retrieve, have limited space, and are environmentally unfriendly. Augmenting paper documents with digital information from mobile devices extends the two-dimensional space of physical paper documents. Various camera-based recognition and detection devices have been proposed to augment paper documents with digital information. However, there are still some limitations that exist in these systems. This paper presents a novel, low cost, spatially aware, mobile system called Ultrasonic PhoneLens. The Ultrasonic PhoneLens adopts two-dimensional dynamic image presentation and ultrasonic sound positioning techniques. It consists of two ultrasonic sound sensors, one Arduino mini-controller board, and one android mobile device. Based on the location of the mobile device over the physical paper, Ultrasonic PhoneLens can retrieve pre-saved digital information from a mobile database for the object (such as a text, a paragraph, or an image) in a paper document. An empirical study was conducted to evaluate the system performance. The results indicate that our system has a better performance in tasks such as browsing multivalent documents and sharing digital information than the Wiimote PhoneLens system.