Disappearing Mobile Devices

Summary:
Mobile devices have seen a trend of growing smaller and smaller as technology permits.  This can be seen in the progression from notebook computers and PDA's to interactive watches and rings.  However, the limiting factor seems not to be the size of the circuitry, but rather the size of the physical user interface.  The paper explored the possibilities and limitations of "disappearing mobile devices" which do not have a large physical user interface, but recognize gestures across it's surface as input.

When devices are miniaturized, several physical aspects become impractical.  For example, capacitive touch pads become touch sensors when miniaturized.  Also, pressure sensing becomes skewed at small scales especially when the sensor is on human skin because pressure sensors generally require placement on hard surfaces.  Motion sensing using two techniques were implemented for the user study: EdgeWrite, where the shapes of letters are modified to minimize multidirectional(circles, arcs, etc) strokes, and Graffiti, where letters are still done in single strokes but are more natural and therefore rely on relative positions.

EdgeWrite

Graffiti

The user study found that EdgeWrite results on a disappearing mobile device was competitive with larger devices, but the error rate for Graffiti nearly doubled and may not be practical.  Based on the findings of the study, they found that miniaturization could still yield meaningful interaction even on such a small scale.

Discussion:

I think the idea of mobile devices becoming smaller and smaller is a very popular idea, but I don't really believe it's the future of electronics.  Especially within the cell phone market, we only temporarily saw a trend toward smaller phones. Instead the idea of smart phones was embraced more readily.  Rather than phones continuing the trend of becoming smaller, we've seen them grow more powerful and subsequently larger.  However, computers seem to be following the trend of growing smaller.  With the advent of the netbook, portability seems to be increasingly more attractive. I do not however foresee micro-laptops the size of a dime being the future.  Rather, I see a collision between phones and computers being the future with some device bridging the gap between smartphones and netbooks.