With physical mobile interaction techniques, digital devices
can make use of real-world objects in order to interact with
them. In this paper, we evaluate and compare state-of-the-art
interaction methods in an extensive survey with 149 participants
and in a lab study with 16 participants regarding efficiency,
utility and usability. Besides radio communication
and fiducial markers, we consider visual feature recognition,
reflecting the latest technical expertise in object identification.
We conceived MobiMed, a medication package identifier implementing
four interaction paradigms: pointing, scanning,
touching and text search.
We identified both measured and perceived advantages and
disadvantages of the individual methods and gained fruitful
feedback from participants regarding possible use cases for
MobiMed. Touching and scanning were evaluated as fastest
in the lab study and ranked first in user satisfaction. The
strength of visual search is that objects need not be augmented,
opening up physical mobile interaction as demonstrated
in MobiMed for further fields of application.