Santosh Basapur

FANFEEDS: evaluation of socially generated information feed on second screen as a TV show companion

In this paper, we describe the development and field trial of a second screen iTV experience called FanFeeds. FanFeeds is a second screen application that allows authoring and consumption of time synchronized secondary content around TV shows. FanFeeds are created by ones social circle as a companion experience to TV shows. For the purpose of concept evaluation, we ran a four-week field trial in 12 households consisting of 4 social groups of 3 friends. A total of 23 unique episodes of 12 different shows were watched while using our prototype. Overall feedback to our concept was mixed. Participants found some good motivations to use the system but they also found a number of concerns related to the nature of the shows they watched and the social dynamics with their friends. Participants revealed that our prototype allowed them to better connect with their TV shows and have an enriched social life around live as well as time-shifted TV content. Participants also described some concerns like distraction from TV show. We explore this contradiction in the paper, along with other valuable lessons we learned. We also report on the motivations that made participants create posts for one another and the different ways in which they used the information from the second screen.

Field trial of a dual device user experience for iTV

With the rise in highly capable, mobile and networked secondary devices, the two-screen Enhanced TV is a more plausible proposition today than ever before. This paper presents a field trial of a prototype that aimed to understand a conceptual merger of TV and second screen user experiences. Our prototype concept can be described as a companion device experience that enhances TV viewing by providing auxiliary information and media on a second screen. The additional media is semantically related and synchronized, in terms of timeline, to the TV content. We ran a three-week field trial in 11 households. Participants used our prototype as a companion to their TV shows. We provided a total of 43 episodes from 10 popular TV shows throughout the study period. Overall feedback to our concept was quite positive. 10 out of our 11 participants said they enjoyed the experience. Our prototype allowed participants to better connect with their TV shows and have an enriched social life around TV. We also report some of the discovered user desires regarding user interaction design such as kinds of customization controls needed and the pacing of posts of additional information to the second screen.

Drawing the city: differing perceptions of the urban environment

In building location-based services, it is important to present information in ways that fit with how individuals view and navigate the city. We conducted an adaptation of the 1970s Mental Maps study by Stanley Milgram in order to better understand differences in peoples views of the city based on their backgrounds and technology use. We correlated data from a demographic questionnaire with the map data from our participants to perform a first-of-its-kind statistical analysis on differences in hand-drawn city maps. We describe our study, findings, and design implications for location-based services.

Investigating the potential of in-home devices for improving medication adherence

We conducted five focus groups with seniors and middle-aged participants who live independently in their own homes to assess the potential value of a home-centered medication reminder system concept. The medication reminder system was conceptualized as a system that uses a television and set-top box, mobile phones and other in-home accessories as a means to set and deliver medication reminders. We found that the main value perceived by participants in the medication reminder system was its ability to provide multiple channels for them to be reminded of medications. The mobile phone, due to its advantages in portability and privacy, was considered to be the most useful device on which to receive reminders. Most participants saw value in receiving secondary reminders on other devices in their home such as the TV, PC, and other in-home accessories. Design implications along with other findings about the challenges faced by participants in managing their medications are discussed.

StoryPlace.Me: the path from studying elder communication to a public location-based video service

We describe our research path that took us from studying communication needs across distance and generations, to a small-scale study of a person-to-person location-based video service, and finally to a public beta of StoryPlace.me which extends this service to support public video sharing and historical content. The process was not a clear, linear design path, but one of an unexpected change in focus that resulted in the current service which goes beyond the original vision of tools for inter-generational communication. We will describe our research methods as well as key findings from each step of our journey and conclude with implications for similar product concept generation activities.

Senior wellness: practices of community senior centers

In the U.S., approximately 15,000 community senior centers provide a broad spectrum of programs for seniors to increase their overall health and wellness in their community. Although previous studies reported on the various benefits of participation in such programs, little research has been conducted to understand how technology can support this practice. We initiated a research study to understand the current practices of senior centers and their potential technology needs. In this article, we describe findings from our literature review as well as a field study with nine senior centers located in urban and suburban areas of Chicago, IL, and Tampa, FL. Based on the preliminary results, we share design implications for future technology development.

A comparative evaluation of TV video telephony with webcam and face to face communication

This study compared user expectations and post-experience value judgments of TV based video calling with Personal Computer (PC)/webcam and face to face communications experiences. Eighteen same gender participant pairs carried out three tasks requiring visual and verbal communications within each condition. Results of the System Usability Scale (SUS) indicated significant differences between all conditions with F2F (face to face) and TV conditions both significantly better than the PC/webcam condition. The youngest age group (17-20) showed the smallest difference between TV and PC conditions. Pre and post experience ratings showed no change in the PC and F2F conditions however overall ratings for the TV condition increased. Subjective scoring indicated this to be due to better than expected performance for TV condition on almost all criteria, and the final rating was not significantly different from that of face to face condition. The study concludes that TV based video calling has the potential to approach the richness of communication afforded by face to face communication if certain design features and privacy/security functions are implemented in the system.

Forward to the theme issue on interactive experiences for television and online video

htmlabstractThe last few years have seen a substantial change on the way media is produced, distributed, and consumed. Within this theme issue on ‘interactive experiences for television and online video’ we revisit some of the most pressing topics in this fascinating research area, which is increasingly interesting to an international community of academics and industrial practitioners. This area engages a wide range of disciplines, from human–computer interaction, multimedia engineering and design to media studies, to media psychology and sociology. The multi-disciplinary community comes together at the annual ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for Television and Online Video (ACM TVX) to discuss the most relevant topics, such as novel interaction techniques, multi-device systems, media environments, and insights into viewers’ experiences based on the analysis of large-scale datasets containing user feedback and behaviour. Within this special issue you will not only be inspired by novel insights into the proliferation of multiple devices for enabling multi-user and multi-screen experiences, but you will be taken on a journey far beyond devices, platforms, and content. Beyond the traditional remote control and voice interaction, researchers are deepening our under- standing about gesture languages for interacting with TV media or viewers’ behaviour towards browsing and searching for content. At the same time, content producers’ accessibility needs are also being investigated with equal enthusiasm.

From the small to the large: learnings from the deployment of serendipitous family stories / storyplace.me

Research in the large is quite different from the more traditional small-scale field studies conducted in Ubicomp over the past decade. Large scale studies are not just small scale ones with a larger n, they allow researchers to answer fundamentally different questions about use and adoption and enable the studying of systems in real and messy social networks and situations. However, conducting large-scale research often requires large-scale resources. We present the evolution of the Serendipitous Family Stories system into StoryPlace.me and discuss how large-scale research required 5x more time and effort to prepare a system for a field trial.

Concept evaluation and usability testing of a TV based video communications system

Abstract Attempts to successfully commercialize video telephony have thus far failed, however technical developments in broadband networks, video encoding, imaging and processing are now making TV based video telephony both technically and commercially viable. This paper describes two empirical studies carried out to evaluate such a concept. A first study assessed the user value of TV based video telephony by means of a comparative evaluation against a PC/webcam solution and face to face communication using subject dyads and structured audio/visual tasks. Significant differences were found between all three conditions; while pre- and post-test Likert scales indicated that ratings for the TV condition increased post-experience and were not significantly different from the face to face condition ratings. Two prototype systems were then developed which enabled TV to TV video telephony calls and a second study was carried out to evaluate in greater depth, the usability and acceptability of the feature sets and their respective ease of access. The studies indicated that TV-based video communications does have intrinsic user value and also has the potential to approach the richness of face to face communications, but that certain control and privacy functions need to be implemented in the UI before this can be fully realized. Such functions included; control over the callers with whom video would be used, control over who could access the videotelephony system, control over the recording of calls, the ability to turn off the self-view and, for total privacy, physical occlusion of the camera when not in use.