An example of the FieldMouse: Combination of a barcodereader and a pen-mouse.
The FieldMouse is an inexpensive position input device, with which a computer can tell the position of the device on paper or any flat surface without using special input tablets or position detection devices. A FieldMouse is a combination of an ID recognizer like a barcode reader and a mouse which detects relative movement of the device. Using a FieldMouse, a user first detects an ID on paper by using the barcode reader, and then drags it from the ID using the mouse. If the location of the ID is known, the location of the dragged FieldMouse can also be calculated by adding the amount of movement from the ID to the position of the FieldMouse. Using a FieldMouse in this way, any flat surface can work as a pointing device that supports absolute position input, just by putting an ID tag somewhere on the surface. A FieldMouse can also be used for enabling a graphical user interface (GUI) on paper or on any flat surface by analyzing the direction and the amount of mouse movement after detecting an ID. In this paper, we introduce how a FieldMouse can be used in various situations to enable computing in real-world environments.
The Active Book is a paper book where links to computer information are embedded in each page. On each page in the book, a barcode is printed at the corner. The picture book shown in Figure 3 is an example of the Active Book. By moving a FieldMouse starting from the barcode at the left top of the page, a user can hear speech or sounds of a character on the page when the FieldMouse passes above the character.
A FieldMouse can also be used for more sophisticated paper-based graphical user interfaces. This figure shows a control page of the Active Boo. If a user moves the FieldMouse to the left or right after scanning the barcode on the volume slider, the FieldMouse can detect the amount of the movement and use it to control the sound playback volume. By moving a FieldMouse in different directions after scanning the barcode on the pie menu, users can select one of the playback language from the list in the menu. Usually only one ID or function is expressed by one barcode, but using this pie menu, a user can select three different functions from one barcode.
This figuer shows an example of using the Scroll Browser system for browsing the back of the wall. A Scroll Browser is a combination of a FieldMouse and a hand-held display. As the user moves the FieldMouse on the wall, images displayed on the monitor also moves and shows the user the wires and pillars behind the wall.
