=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-402/paper-5
|storemode=property
|title=User Generated Ambient Presence
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-402/paper05.pdf
|volume=Vol-402
}}
==User Generated Ambient Presence==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-402/paper05.pdf
User Generated Ambient Presence
Germán Lado Insua1,2 Mike Bennett1 Paddy Nixon1 Lorcan Coyle1
1
Systems Research Group
School of Computer Science & Informatics
University College Dublin, Ireland
2
National University of Distance Education, Spain
germanlado@gmail.com, {mike.bennett, paddy.nixon, lorcan.coyle}@ucd.ie
ABSTRACT
Presence is an important part of our day to day lives. Of-
ten we will have a sense of who is around us and what they
are doing by the sounds of doors closing, cupboards bang-
ing, footsteps on floors, voices vaguely heard through walls,
Figure 1: Examples of three different Jewels.
etc. In digital spaces, such as GUI desktops, presence en-
hances our sense of connection with geographical separate
friends and colleagues. In this paper we report on Ambi- boards banging, footsteps on floors, voices vaguely heard
ent Jewelry, which is a project exploring the intersection of through walls, etc. In digital spaces, such as GUI desktops,
individual and user generated customization with ambient presence enhances our sense of connection with geographical
presence displays. With this research we are seeking tech- separate friends and colleagues. For example when you use
niques that enable people to invent, discover and find new an Instant Messaging (IM) client you see which friends are
forms of ambient presence visualisations. currently online or away, and when engaged in IM chat you
are also told whether the people in the conversation are typ-
Categories and Subject Descriptors ing. On social network sites, such as Facebook, presence has
H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User a more explicit form. We are told what the people in our
Interfaces social network did, e.g. Mark joined the Ireland network,
Germán and Mike are now friends.
General Terms As of yet presence representations, such as in Instant Mes-
Presence, Ubiquitousness, HCI, Instant Messaging, Commu- saging clients, rarely enable us to control how our presence
nication Patterns, Digital Presence is represented. We cannot decide to design colourful Jewels
rather than virtual flowers (ambient presence avatars) that
1. INTRODUCTION spin on our friend’s desktops to show how fast we’re typing.
Ambient Jewelry is a work-in-progress project that explores Nor can we create the relationships between arbitrarily de-
the intersection of individual and user generated customiza- signed presence avatars and how transforms of the avatars
tion with ambient presence. The aim is to enable the cre- encode actions.
ation of more personal and richer forms of ambient presence,
with the aspiration that this will allow us to more deeply The representation of presence tends to be specified by the
connect with our friends and family in a non-intrusive man- designers of the presence systems. A designer decides that
ner. Within this project we used small rounded windows colourful squares on a desktop cube are suitable for rep-
that we call Jewels, to display the User activity. An exam- resenting a remote friend’s movement, while another de-
ple of this Jewels can be seen on Figure 1. signer designs a presence representation where an artifical
flower opening means a friend is walking into a distant room,
Awareness of presence is an important part of our day to day or flowing water represents variations in currency exchange
lives. Often we will have a sense of who is around us and rates [10].
what they are doing by the sounds of doors closing, cup-
Within the project we took an open design approach. That
is we acknowledge that users may be better suited to invent-
ing presence representations to suit their needs, social status
and social connectedness. There are two different roles for
users to design and personalise Ambient Jewelry presence:
1. The Creator of an Ambient Jewel: They design an
Ambient Jewel to fit their likes, e.g. they create the
Copyright © 2008 for the individual papers by the papers' initial graphical design of a Jewel from a family pho-
authors. Copying permitted for private and academic
purposes. Re-publication of material from this volume
requires permission by the copyright owners.
tograph (static content). Then they make the Jewel
dynamic by setting up how the graphical look of the
Jewel changes based on their actions, e.g. type fast
and Jewel blinks fast.
Once a Creator has made a new Jewel they may share Figure 2: Examples of two different Jewels changing.
it with their friends. When a Jewel is shared with
friends it is sent to the friend’s remote desktop GUIs.
When a Jewel is shown on a desktop it continues chang- BuddyBeads[3] is an example of research into creating phys-
ing based on the Creators remote actions. ical Jewels that represent different emotions as non-verbal
messages.
2. The User of Ambient Jewels: The User is the person
who receives the Jewel and who sees it visually chang- Another interesting example is Ambient Furniture that con-
ing on their desktop. nects two geographically separated family tables, e.g. place
a cup on one table and a vague outline of the cup appears
The design process still continues with the User be- on the other table [5].
cause the User is able to use their friends’ Jewels to
decorate their desktop. A User with more Jewels has Studies have shown how the design of Instant Messaging
more options to arrange them into aesthetically and communication software affects interpersonal relationships
artistically appealing patterns, shapes and clusters. [1]. From these studies we understand how technology can
be redesigned to improve human communication and con-
nectedness [11].
In this paper we outline our framework for and approach to
enabling Users to become designers of their ambient presence Based on the results of the preliminary discussions from [6]
displays. We are especially interested in understanding how we understand that some participants got confused by the
the Users of a Jewel perceive the Jewel Creators actions. concept of an unrelated picture (avatar) representing them
or their fellow participants. The same issue applies to Ambi-
By introducing sharing of the ambient displays we are indi- ent Jewelry, since each user is able to create a unique Jewel
rectly forcing Users to reflect on their meanings. Will groups with unique changes based on what they do and what they
of friends converge and create the same style of Jewels, al- want to represent. We discuss this further in Section 4.
most forming a shared ambient display graphical language
that is specific to their group or community? Or will cer- 3. AMBIENT JEWELRY OVERVIEW
tain graphical representations and Jewel transforms emerge Ambient Jewelry consists of a cross-platform framework that
across all Users, because they make ”sense” in an ambient easily lets people create and share their presence avatars.
display? These avatars, which we have called Jewels, consist of small
shaped windows of approximately 20-100 pixels. The Jew-
We are aware of the possible disturbing effects that could be els allow the display of people’s actions on their friends and
created by people (especially by blinking and other distract- colleagues’ computers. So if a friend of mine has my Jewel,
ing effects). The base effects are smooth and slow, but Users he will be able to know if I am connected, typing, or moving
are allowed to alter and speed them up using modifiers. We the mouse about. Furthermore, he will know I am doing
consider interesting what the outcome of these broader lim- such actions by watching what my Jewel does on his desk-
its may be. Will users tend to create disturbing effects? Or top. For example, I could design my Jewel to visually fade
will they socially agree not to use them? while changing color to red in order to display that I am
really busy typing with my keyboard. There are many more
With this research we are seeking techniques that enable actions that can follow the scheme:
people to invent, discover and find new forms of ambient
presence visualisations. ACTION -> EFFECT
Visually fading a Jewel is like this:
2. BACKGROUND
Presence and Ambient Displays have been explored in many
Typing -> Fade-Red
innovative research projects [2, 11, 8]. For example Info-
Canvas is an implementation of a user customizable ambient
Other possible actions include:
display where users can design the contents of the ambient
display as part of information art[7]. Another similar display
Open-Windows->Sparkling
is Scope [9], which consists of small iconic representations
Mouse-Movement->Rotation
based on notifications.
Listening-Music->Blinking
There are numerous different approaches to digital pres-
ence awareness. In Prior et al. tell us about an interface 3.1 INTERFACE
they created based on metaphors of the real world to help The main Ambient Jewelry program consists of:
older adults understand the concept of Instant Messaging
[6]. While Kranz et al. [4] created a novel physical device Jewels (Figure 2): Shaped display windows that represent
to share our on-line status. other people’s presence. They are placed on the desktop.
Figure 3: Cross-platform system tray application
icon with menu (Linux, Windows and MacOS). Figure 5: Design Tool window for creating Jewels.
Figure 6: Example of several Ambient Jewels laid
Figure 4: Jewel Manager window for managing Jew-
out on the center of a KDE desktop.
els.
desktops to create formations, patterns and designs with
This is the part of the Ambient Jewelry software with which them. By doing this the User could create their own form
the User of Ambient Jewels interact with. Each Jewel has of ambient display consisting of other people’s customized
its own window. Jewels (ambient displays). We are aware of the possible
complexity this system could have when loading a consid-
System Tray Icon (Figure 3): This icon is the control erable amount of Jewels. In order to enhance the learning
point for all the other windows. Through it the User can curve of who owns each Jewel, we are debating displaying
access the different functions of the software via the popup each owner’s name and action performed in small tags when
item menu. Even if no Jewels are being displayed on the a Jewel is clicked.
desktop the software runs in server mode gathering action
data (e.g. mouse movement) and sending it to client Jewels. The idea of aggregating customization of others customiza-
When the System Tray icon is used to quit remote Jewels tion opens another facet of user customization. We are plan-
stop getting updated. ning on expanding Ambient Jewelry to allow the User to
personalize his own actions with other people’s Jewel based
Jewel Manager (Figure 4): Displays the list of Jewels formations. This can be thought of as an Object Orien-
available in the system. The Jewel Manager allows a User tated style inheritance of ambient displays. Another option
to carry out management tasks such as the installation of is to include some physical interaction algorithms so as to
new Jewels, or adding Jewels to or removing Jewels from let the Jewels get sticky with each other, or allow them to
the desktop. move and interact with other Jewels. With these features
we could provide a totally customizable interface from the
Design Tool (Figure 5): Allows the Creator to build, cus- User and the Creator’s point of view.
tomize and modify their Jewels. In this window they can
design a Jewel or assign the actions to the graphical trans- Example of use:
formations applied to a Jewel. In order to achieve this, the
window consists of different options such as sliders to control
the amount of time, color and different movements (trans- 1. Creator: Creates their Jewel by using the Design Tool
formations, rotations, shakes, etc.) applied to graphics that with the effects:
represent actions.
Mouse-movement->Rotation
Jewel Desktop Layout (Figure 6): A major feature of Number-of-Windows-Opened->Sparkling
Ambient Jewelry is that it enables Users with Jewels on their Away-From-Computer->Fade
Keyboard-Typing->Smooth-Blinking supported by Science Foundation Ireland under grant num-
ber 04/RPI/1544 “Secure and predictable pervasive comput-
When finished designing the Jewel the Creator saves ing”.
the creation to a *.GEM file that stores all the data.
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5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to ongoing support from the School of Computer
Science and Informatics, University College Dublin, Ireland.
Thanks to ODCSSS, which is part funded by an Undergrad-
uate Research Experience and Knowledge grant (UREKA)
from the Science Foundation Ireland. This work is partially