Samarth Singhal

Escaping Together: The Design and Evaluation of a Distributed Real-Life Escape Room

In real-life escape rooms, players try to escape a locked room by solving a series of puzzles. Currently, escape rooms involve collocated collaboration; however, there is potential for them to be distributed. We explored the design of a distributed escape room that connected two distance-separated rooms through audio/video links and shared artifacts. We evaluated it with pairs of participants to explore the design factors that affected player experiences. Results show that an audio connection created feelings of social presence. Video links augmented this connection to help players share knowledge and artifacts, however, showing less over the video feed created curiosity. Players expected a parallel setup between artifacts and puzzles in the rooms, despite the rooms being designed to vary in similarity and how closely players needed to collaborate. These results suggest directions for the design of audio connections to represent remote players, video feeds for sharing artifacts and promoting curiosity, and the use of both similar and dissimilar artifacts as a part of puzzles.

Time-Turner: Data Engagement Through Everyday Objects in the Home

Families enjoy capturing digital media about their life and replaying moments, yet it is not always easy to do so. To explore this design space, we created a physical, ambient, and situated visualization prototype called Time-Turner specifically designed for a home setting that records video of family activities and allows families to review their past activities. We report our design requirements, design rationale and the implications of our work for future design researchers.

Caller Needs and Reactions to 9-1-1 Video Calling for Emergencies

Emergency services in North America have relied on the use of audio calls to the phone number, 9-1-1, since the late 1960s. In the coming years, 9-1-1 services will move to integrate media-rich calling capabilities such as video-based calling. We explore how video calling services should be designed through an interview study with people who have called 9-1-1 in the past. Our results show the potential for video calling to help people who are calling 9-1-1 describe their location to call takers, show the situation at hand, receive video-based instructions, and assist in cases with language barriers. Yet video calling raises issues around anonymity, consent, culture and gender-based biases, and camera work. 9-1-1 video calling is best thought of as a collaborative act where camera work is negotiated between callers and call takers where callers are willing to hand over control of the call if their privacy concerns can be met.