IT鈥橲 a latter-day social affliction: you visit friends or family, only for them to whip out a laptop and run a seemingly endless photo slide show 鈥� perhaps using an online outfit such as Flickr or Picasa. But for those people used to savouring prints as they are passed around, such shows can be about as compelling as 鈥渄eath by Powerpoint鈥�.
Help could be at hand, however. Researchers at Deutsche Telekom in Germany and the University of Newcastle in the UK have dreamed up a curious cellphone-centred way to bridge the gap between what they call the Kodak and Flickr generations.
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What the Kodak generation miss, says Newcastle鈥檚 lead researcher Christian Kray, is the tactile nature of holding a photographic print. The team aimed to create an interaction which 鈥渞esembles the passing around of stacks of paper photographs鈥�.
First, they tried simply sitting groups of five people at a table and asking them to swap digital photos one-to-one on their camera-phones using Bluetooth. 鈥淚t didn鈥檛 work,鈥� says Kray. 鈥淪ome people paired up, leaving some people on their own.鈥�
To foster greater group cohesion, they looked at a method that could share photos with all group members simultaneously. 鈥淲e came up with the idea of using spatial regions, like auras, around the table,鈥� says Kray. An 鈥渁ura鈥� in the middle of the table was used to upload pictures to the whole group, while a concentric outer aura was for downloading and viewing them.
鈥淭he inner 鈥榓ura鈥� is where you upload pictures to the group and the outer aura is for looking at them鈥�
The team wrote software which displayed a different barcode-like pattern at the top of every phone screen, so that an overhead camera could recognise which aura each phone was in. When a phone was placed in the upload aura, the camera triggered a Bluetooth-enabled PC to broadcast its photographic contents to the other smartphones.
鈥淧eople really enjoyed sharing pictures this way, with everyone getting the photos at the same time and all having something to hold,鈥� says Kray, though some felt a lack of control over downloads. 鈥淭hey thought people could elbow their way into the pub and steal your compromising photo.鈥�
The system could be built into future smartphones, using their cameras to seek out barcodes on neighbouring phones, says Kray.
鈥淭his sounds like a very interesting technology and it may have other applications 鈥� like sharing business information in meetings,鈥� says Robert Caunt, a consumer electronics expert with London-based market analyst CCS Insight. 鈥淏ut I鈥檓 not sure sharing photos is what it will be best at. After all, photo printer sales are still fairly strong.鈥�
