F2FMI: A toolkit for facilitating face-to-face mobile interaction

The importance of mobile groupware systems resides in the specific tasks that they can perform and other systems cannot. On the one hand, groupware systems allow groups of users to work together providing facilities that single-user systems are unable to offer. On the other hand, unlike stationary systems, mobile systems allow users to work on the move. The intersection of these two technologies offers a new support for activities, such as spontaneous collaboration, that could be facilitated neither by stationary groupware systems nor by mobile single-user systems. However, implementations of this new support are uncommon, probably because of the high development effort required and the seemingly little benefit obtained. In this paper, we aim to reduce this effort by facilitating the development of mobile groupware applications that support such activities. Our proposal to achieve this objective involves the design and implementation of the Face-to-Face Mobile Interaction (F2FMI) toolkit, whose goal is to provide generic and reusable software components required in most cases. We expect this strategy to yield a higher variety of successfully deployed applications, which in turn will demonstrate the benefits of supporting this kind of interactions through mobile devices.