A Touch Is Worth A Thousand Clicks

The fusion of interaction and discovery technologies can facilitate easy, intuitive and impromptu access to networked entities by users without the need for significant administrative overhead. Due to mobility, complex connectivity and small user interfaces, traditional service discovery methods fail to meet the demands placed by such environments. This paper presents work-in-progress on how NFC-enhanced mobile devices can enable intuitive service discovery by non-expert users in smart environments through simple gestures such as touch. With this new paradigm, physical space becomes an extension of the traditional GUI. An extensible RFID tag record is presented that can be utilised in a variety of scenarios. The proposed approach is further illustrated through a technical realisation based on the UPnP framework. An example use case is selected and the step-by-step process of service discovery and user interaction is described.