How it Works
Find out where you are
Upoint lets you control the cursor on any Screen by simply pointing your phone at where you want the cursor to be. Unlike other products that are on the market today, Upoint feels and handles as intuitively as a laser-pointer - with all the interactivity of a mouse.
To make this possible, Upoint uses the iPhone's Augmented Reality capabilities to establish where it is relative to its Real World surroundings. The iPhone's camera and its motion sensors play an important role in this.
Find out where the Screen is
With the location of the phone known, all that's left is to find out where the Screen is.
Since the Screen is a rectangle with horizontal and vertical sides, all Upoint needs is the 3D position of its corners. This can be facilitated by the user using the iPhone as a camera to Mark the corners.
An even simpler way than marking the corners is to use the so-called LinkSlide in combination with the iPhone's QR-capabilities to automatically find the Screen's corners: simply take a picture of the Screen !
Venues that often engage in hosting Presenters can elect to store the Screen's 3D details in a special Venue QR Code that can be mounted close to the Screen. A simple scan of code is enough to turn your iPhone into an Interactive LaserPointer !
Connect App and PC or Mac
To connect the iPhone to the PC or Mac running the Presentation, the Upoint App needs to be accompanied by a Upoint Driver. The two use BlueTooth as well as WiFi to communicate with each other. When started, the Upoint Driver automatically uses BlueTooth to listen out for any close-by iPhones that run Upoint. When it finds one, it relays the necessary details to the App to connect over WiFi. For this to work, both the iPhone and the PC need to share the same WiFi network. If not, or if a FireWall prevents connection, the system falls back onto the BlueTooth connection.
If for some reason BlueTooth does not work, the ConnectQR code visible on the Driver window can also be scanned to transfer the necessary connection parameters to the Upoint App.
We recommend using WiFi to connect App and PC or Mac, since it provides a smoother experience as compared to BlueTooth.
Point, click, switch slides
When the Screen has been identified, and with the iPhone communicating with a PC or a Mac, you can control the cursor by simply pointing your phone at where you want it to be. Since you're controlling the cursor instead of a laserdot, your point-of-aim is now visible on all screens that feature the Presentation - perfect for hybrid conferences that are increasingly becoming the norm. Being fully interactive, mouse-clicks and (PowerPoint) slide control are of course standard.
FineTuning
As with as laserpointer, users might find it hard to steady the iPhone to such an extent that small on-Screen buttons etc can be activated. For this reason, the Upoint App also features a FineTune cursor control mode, in which the user can simply use swiping gestures on the iPhone's screen to finetune the position of the cursor.
