That one there! Pointing to establish device identity

Computing devices within current work and play environments are relatively static. As the number of 'networked' devices grows, and as people and their devices become more dynamic, situations will commonly arise where users will wish to use 'that device there' instead of navigating through traditional user interface widgets such as lists. This paper describes a process for identifying devices through a pointing gesture using custom tags and a custom stylus called the gesturePen. Implementation details for this system are provided along with qualitative and quantitative results from a formal user study. As ubiquitous computing environments become more pervasive, people will rapidly switch their focus between many computing devices. The results of our work demonstrate that our gesturePen method can improve the user experience in ubiquitous environments by facilitating significantly faster interactions between computing devices.