All together now: visualizing local and remote actors of localized activity

ABSTRACT

We present All Together Now (ATN), a tool for visualizing localized activities involving both local and remote actors. ATN presents each user with a webpage containing a common view of a shared virtual space modeled after the physical locus of the activity. Actors signal socially meaningful behavior by manipulating the spatial positions of their representations in this space. Local actors' positions are acquired automatically using computer vision. Remote actors indicate their positions with a mouse. Actors are not expressly identified. ATN exploits people's culturally established notions of spatial position to help them convey contextually relevant social cues to each other. Conveying just enough spatial and identity information helps optimize-without needlessly eliminating-the awareness asymmetries intrinsic to localized distance work

REFERENCES

• 1: Thomas Erickson, Designing visualizations of social activity: six claims, CHI '03 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/765891.766027]
• 2: Thomas Erickson , Christine Halverson , Wendy A. Kellogg , Mark Laff , Tracee Wolf, Social translucence: designing social infrastructures that make collective activity visible, Communications of the ACM, v.45 n.4, April 2002 [doi>10.1145/505248.505270]
• 3: Thomas Erickson , Wendy A. Kellogg, Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), v.7 n.1, p.59-83, March 2000 [doi>10.1145/344949.345004]
• 4: Friedman, N. and Russell, S., Image Segmentation in Video Sequences: A Probabilistic Approach. Proc. UAI 1997, Morgan Kaufmann (1997), 175--181.
• 5: Goldberg, K., et al. Collaborative Online Teleoperation with Spatial Dynamic Voting and a Human "Tele-Actor". Proc. ICRA 2002, IEEE (2002), 1179--1184.
• 6: Steve Harrison , Paul Dourish, Re-place-ing space: the roles of place and space in collaborative systems, Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, p.67-76, November 16-20, 1996, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/240080.240193]
• 7: Scott E. Hudson , Ian Smith, Techniques for addressing fundamental privacy and disruption tradeoffs in awareness support systems, Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, p.248-257, November 16-20, 1996, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/240080.240295]
• 8: Karahalios, K. and Dobson, K. Chit Chat Club, http://smg.media.mit.edu/projects/ChitChatClub/.
• 9: Scott R. Klemmer , Jack Li , James Lin , James A. Landay, Papier-Mache: toolkit support for tangible input, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.399-406, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985692.985743]
• 10: Olson, G.M. and Olson, J.S. Distance Matters. Human-Computer Interaction, 15 (2/3). 139--178.
• 11: Eric Paulos , John Canny, PRoP: personal roving presence, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.296-303, April 18-23, 1998, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/274644.274686]
• 12: Fernanda B. Viégas , Judith S. Donath, Chat circles, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: the CHI is the limit, p.9-16, May 15-20, 1999, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/302979.302981]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Graphical user interfaces (GUI)

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces
          Subjects: Collaborative computing; Web-based interaction; Synchronous interaction; Computer-supported cooperative work

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
computer-mediated communication (CMC), localized activity, localized distance work, social visualization