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Social gravity: a virtual elastic tether for casual, privacy-preserving pedestrian rendezvous

Published: 10 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

We describe a virtual "tether" for mobile devices that allows groups to have quick, simple and privacy-preserving meetups. Our design provides cues which allow dynamic coordination of rendezvous without revealing users' positions. Using accelerometers and magnetometers, combined with GPS positioning and non-visual feedback, users can probe and sense a dynamic virtual object representing the nearest meeting point. The Social Gravity system makes social bonds tangible in a virtual world which is geographically grounded, using haptic feedback to help users rendezvous. We show dynamic navigation using this physical model-based system to be efficient and robust in significant field trials, even in the presence of low-quality positioning. The use of simulators to build models of mobile geolocated systems for pre-validation purposes is discussed, and results compared with those from our trials. Our results show interesting behaviours in the social coordination task, which lead to guidelines for geosocial interaction design. The Social Gravity system proved to be very successful in allowing groups to rendezvous efficiently and simply and can be implemented using only commercially available hardware.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2010
2690 pages
ISBN:9781605589299
DOI:10.1145/1753326
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 10 April 2010

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Author Tags

  1. geosocial interaction
  2. gps
  3. mobile
  4. navigation
  5. vibrotactile

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  • (2023)Navigation Method Enhancing Music Listening Experience by Stimulating Both Neck Sides With Modulated Musical VibrationIEEE Transactions on Haptics10.1109/TOH.2023.326619416:2(228-239)Online publication date: Apr-2023
  • (2022)What simulation can do for HCI researchInteractions10.1145/356403829:6(48-53)Online publication date: 3-Nov-2022
  • (2022)Hand-Held Haptic Navigation Devices for Actual WalkingIEEE Transactions on Haptics10.1109/TOH.2022.320935015:4(655-666)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2022
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  • (2018)A Study of Perception Using Mobile Device for Multi-haptic FeedbackHuman Interface and the Management of Information. Interaction, Visualization, and Analytics10.1007/978-3-319-92043-6_19(218-226)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2018
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