Improvement of Smartphone Interface Using an AR Marker

Abstract

Smartphones have come into wide use recently, and are increasingly popular not only among young people, but also among middleaged people as well. Most smartphones use a capacitive full touch screen, where touch commands are made by the user’s fingers, unlike PDAs in the past that used touch pens. In this case, a significant portion of the smartphone’s screen is blocked by the finger and thus it is impossible to see the screen around the finger touching the screen. Furthermore, precise control for small buttons such as a QWERTY keyboard is difficult. To resolve these problems, this paper proposes a method of using simple AR markers to improve the interface of smartphones. A sticker-form marker is attached to the user’s fingernails and placed in front of the smartphone camera. A camera image of the marker is then analyzed to determine the position and the orientation of the marker, and its position is used as the position of the mouse cursor. This method can enable click, double-click, and drag-and-drop used in PCs as well as touch, slide, and long-touch-input in smartphones. Through this research, more precise and simple smartphone inputs can be realized.