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Proactive displays: Supporting awareness in fluid social environments

ACM Transactions on Computer-human Interaction, 2008

Academic conferences provide a social space for people to present their work and interact with one another. However, opportunities for interaction are unevenly distributed among the attendees. We seek to extend the opportunities for interaction among attendees by using technology to enable them to reveal information about their background and interests in different settings. We evaluate a suite of applications that augment three physical social spaces at an academic conference. The applications were designed to augment formal conference paper sessions and informal breaks. A mixture of qualitative observation and survey response data are used to frame the impacts from both individual and group perspectives. Respondents reported on their interactions and serendipitous findings of shared interests with other attendees. However, some respondents also identify distracting aspects of the augmentation. Our discussion relates these results to existing theory of group behavior in public places and how these social space augmentations relate to awareness as well as the problem of shared interaction models.

Dynamo: a public interactive surface supporting the cooperative sharing and exchange of media

Proceedings of the …, 2003

In this paper we propose a novel way of supporting occasional meetings that take place in unfamiliar public places, which promotes lightweight, visible and fluid collaboration. Our central idea is that the sharing and exchange of information occurs across public surfaces that users can easily access and interact with. To this end, we designed and implemented Dynamo, a communal multiuser interactive surface. The surface supports the cooperative sharing and exchange of a wide range of media that can be brought to the surface by users that are remote from their familiar organizational settings.

Dynamo: Supporting sharing and collaboration around public interactive surfaces

ABSTRACT In this paper we propose a novel way of supporting occasional meetings that take place in unfamiliar public places, which promotes lightweight, visible and fluid collaboration. Our central idea is that the sharing and exchange of information should occur across public surfaces that all participants at the meeting have access to and can easily interact with. To this end, we designed and implemented Dynamo, a communal multi-user interactive surface.

Toward Connected Shared Experiences

Computer, 2014

To move beyond the current "talking heads" paradigm and enable truly natural and immersive shared experiences, video-mediated communication systems must be able to understand the context of the shared activity as well as the social layer of interaction. With the increasing number of heterogeneous devices accessing the Internet and many people using multiple devices-sometimes simultaneously-to communicate, the notion of connected shared experiences is gaining momentum within the social networking and social computing communities. In this column, the authors highlight a paradigm shift in video-mediated communication from "talking heads," in which we see each other's faces but not much else, to more natural and intimate interactive environments. In such environments, the system's ability to adapt to the context and to social cues is critical to achieving a satisfactory quality of experience. The authors outline fundamental system requirements and call for the development of new use cases. Christian Timmerer, column editor People are social beings: whether engaging in work, play or social conversations, we seek to interact with others. Current technologies support various types of interaction among individuals at different locationsfor example, remote learning, connected healthcare, and multiparty videoconferencing-but are limited in both coverage and flexibility. However, research in this area has flourished in recent years and is moving communication from static interpersonal exchanges to dynamic shared experiences. The challenge is to export promising results from the lab to the world. The following provides an overview of the present state of technology in this field through a few examples and discuss future possibilities and challenges. We highlight a key research goal: to provide adaptive communication systems that react not only to changes at the network and application layers, but also at the social layer of interaction. Connected Shared Experiences Linking multiple people across physical spaces is not a new idea. As Figure 1 shows, connected shared experiences were envisioned soon after the telephone's invention in 1876. Since then, academic and industry efforts to achieve immersive group communication have met with varying degrees of success. 1 Recent developments include the rapid adoption of video-mediated communication technologies by home users 2 and children reading with long-distance family members via background-subtracted video communication. 3 We have made great strides in the past century and a half but still have a long way to go. The next step, as discussed in a workshop at the 2013 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (http://clab.iat.sfu.ca/beyondtalkingheads), is to move beyond the "talking heads" paradigm that characterizes most video chat systems, like Skype and Google Hangouts, to provide rich communication support for everyday activities such as holiday get-togethers, outdoor sports events, shared meals, birthday parties, storytelling, or just "hanging out." Solving these challenges will open new opportunities for the realization of connected shared experiences. Still, the obstacles ahead are significant. Real-time content analysis algorithms that enable communication systems to understand what's going on are very difficult to construct, given the inherent noise. We're still in the infancy of comprehending the effect of each remote activity and the level of intimacy on parameters affecting QoE. Standards and methodologies for assessing QoE are nonexistent. Automatic adaptation mechanisms that consider the network, application, and social layers are rather basic and limited to specific use cases. This article is a call for the research community to focus on these fundamental research questions that will in turn enable new use cases, like distributed performing arts reaching large interactive audiences at home, as in Figure 2b. Technological advances such as more efficient video-streaming protocols, more powerful sensors, faster processors, and improved networking abilities aren't sufficient to move beyond today's talking heads paradigm and enable connected shared experiences. Video-mediated communication systems must also be able to understand the nature of the shared activity and social cues to make such experiences natural and immersive. Key challenges to realizing this vision include context awareness, cue processing, QoE monitoring, and reasoning processes that dynamically adapt to environmental changes at the networking layer (such as longer end-to-end delays), application layer (turn changes during board game play), or social layer (the fact that someone doesn't talk, for example). To achieve such automatic adaptation, new reasoning approaches and algorithms need to be developed and studied.

Enhancing interactive public displays with social networking services

Proc. 9th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2010), 2010

In this paper, we suggest utilizing modern social networking services for building versatile applications for interactive public displays. We demonstrate the functionality and potential of this approach by presenting a set of services deployed on top of a network of public displays, utilized in a longitudinal study in an authentic city setting. We further propose utilizing users’ personal online profiles for building personalized and appealing public social services, and suggest that this may enhance the attractiveness of interactive public displays. Results of this study indicate that using interactive public displays is inherently a social event, and that services supporting group use and sociality succeed in urban smart spaces.

IMIM - a Concept and Prototype for Collective Documentation of Community Events

2004

In this paper we will present two interventions made in the context of two community events that introduce the activity of collective and participatory documentation of an event. The issue was explored by using working prototypes of a "video commentary collector" application (IMIM). We are interested in working with prototypes, not only as a way to validate and prove a concept, but also as an active strategy to collectively understand and reflect on the existing and emerging new practices of communities. Our exploration suggests an approach for achieving "artful" and meaningful integration of different media with existing and emerging practices of a community.