Mirjana Spasojevic

Making love in the network closet: the benefits and work of family videochat

In this paper, we explore the benefits of videochat for families and the corresponding work that home users engage in to make a video call run smoothly. We explore the varieties of social work required, including coordination work, presentation work, behavioral work, and scaffolding work, as well as the technical work necessary. We outline the benefits families enjoy for doing this work and discuss the ways in which families use videochat to reinforce their identity as a family and reinforce their family values, in effect making - as in creating - love. We conclude with recommendations for improving videochat and for designing with family values in mind more generally.

Family story play: reading with young children (and elmo) over a distance

We introduce Family Story Play, a system that supports grandparents to read books together with their grandchildren over the Internet. Family Story Play is designed to improve communication across generations and over a distance, and to support parents and grandparents in fostering the literacy development of young children. The interface encourages active child participation in the book reading experience by combining a paper book, a sensor-enhanced frame, video conferencing technology, and video content of a Sesame Street Muppet (Elmo). Results with users indicate that Family Story Play improves child engagement in long-distance communication and increases the quality of interaction between young children and distant grandparents. Additionally, Family Story Play encourages dialogic reading styles that are linked with literacy development. Ultimately, reading with Family Story Play becomes a creative shared activity that suggests a new kind of collaborative story telling.

Hello, is grandma there? let's read! StoryVisit: family video chat and connected e-books

StoryVisit allows children and long-distance adults to experience a sense of togetherness by reading childrens story books together over a distance. StoryVisit combines video conferencing and connected books: remote grown-up and child readers can see and hear each other, and can also see and control the same e-book. We report on research with 61 families - over 200 users including parents, children and long-distance readers - who used StoryVisit in their homes with a long-distance reader for at least one reading session. In addition, we report qualitative findings regarding nineteen of the families who participated in telephone interviews and four families who were monitored and interviewed by researchers at home. Results show that connected e-book video chat sessions last about five times as long as the typical video chats reported in previous research on families with young children. Moreover, the addition of an animated character increased session lengths by another 50%. StoryVisit usage peaked for families with three year olds, showing that sustained distance interactions with very young children are possible if communication technologies incorporate joint activities that engage children and adults.

Fear and the city: role of mobile services in harnessing safety and security in urban use contexts

This paper describes investigation of a mobile communication system that helps alleviate fear experienced in the urban context. In order to obtain empirically grounded insights for the concept design, urban females in their twenties and thirties and living in Bangalore, New Delhi and San Francisco, were studied. More than 200 females filled in an online survey. Extensive qualitative data for 13 participants were collected through week long diaries, semi-structured interviews, and situated participative enactment of scenarios. Fear-related concerns were voiced both in India and the U.S., suggesting that reducing fear, particularly in a pedestrian context after the onset of darkness, could be a globally applicable need. User research findings into subjective experiences of fear, contexts in which they occur, and behavioral strategies were used to design a mobile service titled ComfortZones. This concept was developed to the level of a high fidelity prototype and tested in a field trial in India. The investigation highlights further opportunities for design, particularly the notion of emphasizing positive and socially successful qualities of cities to communities concerned with their safety and security.

They call it surfing for a reason: identifying mobile internet needs through pc internet deprivation

In this case study we describe the details of a PC Internet deprivation study used to gather information on mobile Internet needs. Eight participants in our study used a mobile device as their only means of Internet access for four days. The case study describes details of the research methodology as well as design insights and implications that resulted from the study.

Interactive rich reading: enhanced book reading experience with a conversational agent

In this work, we introduce Interactive Rich Reading, a new enhanced book experience designed to run on smartphones and a tablet device. Interactive Rich Reading is characterized by a video-based conversational agent that asks questions or makes comments about the current page and is specifically designed to promote engagement with the contents of childrens books. We use video compositing techniques to overlay the conversational agent directly over the book contents, creating a magical experience for children by bringing the book to life. We describe technical issues related to enabling this experience on mobile platforms for easier adoption of this technique by other researchers and practitioners.

Story Time for the 21st Century

Family Story Play is an interactive book-reading system designed for two-to-four-year-olds that couples videoconferencing with paper books and interactive content to support grandparents reading together with their grandchildren over the Internet. The Story Play system is designed to improve the amount and quality of interaction between children and distant grandparents by shifting interactions from conversation to shared activities. Ethnographic methods provide a rich understanding of current family practices. Findings from this research help the authors articulate the design rationale behind Story Play and express opportunities in a broader design space for family communication.

Photos for information: a field study of cameraphone computer vision interactions in tourism

Advances in mobile computing and computer vision can support camera-based interactions with mobile devices, including systems that use image-matching to support getting information about objects identified by the camera. These interfaces, sometimes considered mobile augmented reality, can be applied in many domains. This paper reports on a field study of these interfaces in a tourism application, which begins to address questions about embodied interaction, existing photo-taking practices, and alternative interfaces.

Brothers and sisters at play: exploring game play with siblings

To effectively design for families, we must understand familial relationships, which exert a significant influence on childrens growth, learning, and play. In particular, siblings can be influential play partners and teachers, providing important scaffolding to each other. We report our observations of eight sibling pairs between ages 6 and 10, playing four popular games of different gaming paradigms. We found that certain patterns of sibling behavior persisted through all game sessions, regardless of the play patterns afforded by the different games, and that parents reports were consistent with our observations. We also observed instances where game design seemed to influence sibling play dynamics. We share our insights into considerations for designing for sibling play, including specialized social dynamics, opportunities for scaffolding, and the particular challenges they present.

Electric Agents: Combining Collaborative Mobile Augmented Reality and Web-Based Video to Reinvent Interactive Television

Electric Agents is a transmedia game that presents new ways for children to actively engage with television content. A typical-looking educational television show transforms into an interactive game in which children collaborate through a mobile augmented reality experience to find and collect vocabulary words that are missing from the show. The players return the words to the show by throwing them back into the television using their mobile devices. This blend of a linear video narrative and an interactive game strives to make educational television content more engaging and participatory while fostering collaborative play with vocabulary words. We describe the technical implementation to support this collaborative mobile augmented reality experience and report findings from a pilot user study. Results demonstrate patterns of collaborative activity, scaffolded learning, and parasocial relationships that have been linked in previous literature to educational benefits.