Can You See Where I Point at?

Pointing on public displays is usually done in a relative and indirect fashion. However, such techniques have two drawbacks: first, a personal pointer is shown on the public screen which decreases the users’ privacy in selection tasks. And second, when multiple displays are present, users need to connect to the one they want to interact with a priori. In this paper we review the strengths of Touch Projector as an absolute and direct pointing device in terms of spontaneously interacting with large public screens in a semiprivate fashion. We briefly describe the infrastructure to allow spontaneous interaction through the display and discuss the use of both the local and remote display to distribute information according to the necessary privacy.