Touchless magnetic interaction with mobile devices

In this paper, we introduce a revolutionary interaction framework that is based on the idea of around device interaction. The proposed method constitutes a touch-less data entry system that is based on the interaction between the magnetic fields around a device and a magnet. The magnetic field that surrounds the device is generated by a magnetic sensor (compass) that is embedded in the new generation of mobile phones. The movements of a permanent magnet in front of the device deforms the sensor´s original magnetic field pattern whereby we can constitute a new means of communication between the user and the device. Thus, the magnetic field encompassing the device plays the role of a communication channel and encodes the hand-movement patterns of the user into temporal changes of the sensor´s magnetic field. In the back-end of the communication, an engine samples the momentary status of the field during a trial and recognizes the user´s pattern by matching it against some pre-recorded templates. The proposed method has been tested in a variety of applications (such as micro-interaction, handwriting recognition, user authentication, etc) and concluded in very promising results.