Smartphone camera based pointer

Large screen displays are omnipresent today as a part of infrastructure for presentations and entertainment. Also powerful smartphones with integrated camera(s) are ubiquitous. However, there are not many ways in which smartphones and screens can interact besides casting the video from a smartphone. In this paper, we present a novel idea that turns a smartphone into a direct virtual pointer on the screen using the phone's camera. The idea and its implementation are simple, robust, efficient and fun to use. Besides the mathematical concepts of the idea we accompany the paper with a small javascript project (www.mobiletvgames.com) which demonstrates the possibility of the new interaction technique presented as a massive multiplayer game in the HTML5 framework.