Speech + Mobility

The living room is the heart of social and communal interactions in a home. Often present in this space is a screen: the television. When in use, this communal gathering space brings together people and their interests, and their varying needs for company, devices, and content. This project focuses on using personal devices such as mobile phones with the television; the phone serves as a controller and social interface by offering a backchannel to convey engagement, laughter, and viewer comments, and to create remote co-presence.

Audio conferences have a number of striking downsides—we lose many of the familiar physical signals from other people that help us judge what other people want to do. In this project, we explore how a new currency for conversation might be added to audio conferences to provide a new channel for non-verbal communication. We're experimenting with different uses for this currency, such as managing the agenda, conversation turn-taking, or length of speaking. Adding this currency provides participants with meaningful, non-verbal ways to communicate through giving currency to people in the meeting you want to support, or spending that currency to guide the meeting in directions in which you want it to move. Mediated environments typically lack these rich backchannels, and we hope that adding new kinds of channels will change the power structures in meetings in a positive way.

Inspired by the fact that people are communicating more and more through technology, Flickr This explores ways for people to have emotion-rich conversations through all kinds of media provided by people and technology—a way for technology to allow remote people to have conversations more like face-to-face experiences by grounding them in shared media. Flickr This lets viewable contents provide structure for a conversation; with a grounding on the viewable contents, conversation can move between synchronous and asynchronous, and evolve into a richer collaborative conversation/media.

When friends give directions, they often don't describe the whole route, but instead provide landmarks along the way which with they think we'll be familiar. Friends can assume we have certain knowledge because they know our likes and dislikes. Going My Way attempts to mimic a friend by learning about where you travel, identifying the areas that are close to the desired destination from your frequent path, and picking a set of landmarks to allow you to choose a familiar one. When you select one of the provided landmarks, Going My Way will provide directions from it to the destination.

Guiding Light is a navigation-based application that provides directions by projecting them onto physical spaces both indoors and outdoors. It enables a user to get relevant spatial information by using a mini projector in a cell phone. The core metaphor involved in this design is that of a flashlight which reveals objects in and information about the space it illuminates. For indoor navigation, Guiding Light uses a combination of an e-compass, an accelerometer, proximity sensors, and tags to appropriately place information. In contrast to existing heads-up displays that push information into the user's field of view, Guiding Light works on a pull principle relying entirely on users' requests and control of information.

Merry Miser is a system to help beat impulse spending and save money. It provides useful and persuasive information at the right time and place, using your mobile phone.

This project is a novel concept for a social TV application, targeting the demographic of viewers enjoying live sports events, such as road bicycle racing. We intend to enhance the viewing experiences of spectators with sensor-fitted bikes tied to an interactive biking environment on television. The system enables a new form of personalized, physical, and virtual-reality interaction between viewers and a TV program, as well as interactions within or among communities of friends. We have created a prototype, My Second Bike, which uses a 3-D mirrored world environment (Google Earth) to visually represent participating spectators, competing athletes, and outdoor bikers. We contend that the system has the potential to attract and support a large user base on account of its scalability, ease of deployment, and ability to promote audience participation in live sports events on TV.

Presentations in virtual environments tend to suffer from a number of common problems: presenters are easily overwhelmed by unfamiliar audience activity, communication among audience members is often difficult and distracting to the presenter, and managing what you're looking at is difficult for both presenters and audience members. In this project, we designed a set of standalone components for Sun Microsystem's Project Wonderland virtual environment that can be combined into a system that addresses these core issues with presentations by taking advantage of the spatial properties of virtual worlds and creating presentation experiences that are more than recreations of face to face experiences. This work was done at Sun Labs in collaboration with the Project Wonderland research group.

Watching TV with multiple people can be an enjoyable social experience, but control of the television is still limited to a single person with the remote. The goal of this project is to improve group interactions by allowing everyone in the room to share control of the television. Traditionally everyone must wait for a single person to flip through the channels in order to find interesting content to watch. With our system, each person can look for content on their individual device and then share it with the group by sending it to the television.

SpaceBox explores the addressing of location-specific messages (text, voice, images) to an intended recipient or group of recipients. Its key features include tagging places of interest when a sender is physically present at that location and projecting messages to a specific location. The recipient would receive such messages only when in the vicinity of the tagged location.