Prospero: Towards a sandbox Prospero: Towards a sandbox for building audience-aware for building audience-aware

public displayspublic displays

Prospero: Towards a sandbox Prospero: Towards a sandbox for building audience-aware for building audience-aware

public displayspublic displays

Ben CongletonBen Congleton

What’s Coming Up?

• Public Displays

• Audience-Aware Public Displays

• Prospero & C4 (Context, Content, and Community Collage)

• The architecture that supports these display applications

• Building new applications

What is a public display?

Public Digital Display - a display situated in a shared space or common area, typically viewed by more than one person at a time.

Paul Resnick’s Thank you DisplayPaul Resnick’s Thank you Display

Josh Palay’s MichiPosterJosh Palay’s MichiPoster

Airport Flight DisplaysAirport Flight Displays

Times SquareTimes Square

What is an audience-aware public display?

A public display that is aware of its audience (or at least one member of its audience)

proactive displays - displays that can sense their context, nearby objects, people and/or activities, and respond with appropriate content. Joe McCarthy, Ubicomp 2003

Prospero - Card Swipe and WebsiteProspero - Card Swipe and Website

Ticket to Talk - RFID Badge

Context, Content and Community Collage - Bluetooth - Bluetooth

Mini Cooper - Aware Billboards (Active RFID)

Attention Meter - Jackie Lee MIT Media Lab

Why is this interesting?

– This is happening now!

• Location and Proximity Aware devices

• (Mini Cooper / Starbucks + itunes)

– This is a relatively new genre of system and warrants exploration.

– People, information, and technology – intertwined yet again

Our Goals thus far

– Focus on an Infrastructure, not on applications.

– Let the community build applications.

– Build an infrastructure that supports “really cool” applications, and use this to explore the design space.

– Show people what can be done with the system using a few good examples.

Previous Work: Two implementations

• Prospero– Infrastructure focused deployment– Short deployment

• C4: Context, Content and Community Collage – Infrastructure + applications deployment– Ongoing deployment

Prospero:Goal Build an Infrastructure to empower users

with control over the content of the display.

• Design lab 1 (supported by GROCS)

• Deployed off and on for a month or so

• Card swipe login -- very low usage

• 2 projectors + LCD Monitor

• Multiple modules

A framework supporting many A framework supporting many modulesmodules

Empower users over their environment

Prospero, Ok…

• Good learning experience

• People really liked the Flickr application

• No formal evaluation

• A great starting point.

C4: Context, Content and Community Collage

• Joe McCarthy

• 3 interns

• Where the vision started to get real.

• Currently still running at Nokia Research

• Paper submitted to pervasive 08

• 8 large touch screen displays

C4 as the center of conversation

C4,• A infrastructure and application in action.

• People socialized around the displays in common areas.

• Very favorable response, and continued usage. (over 835 actions in the past week)

• All surveyed users felt the displays had some positive impact on their personal relationships.

So what?• C4 and Prospero are examples of how Audience-

Aware Public Displays (Proactive) can produce novel interactions, and add value.

• We can’t build every application – someone else will figure out a killer app?

• However, with an infrastructure it becomes easier to prototype new applications.

So what’s behind all this?

• A framework / infrastructure / toolkit for building audience-aware public display applications.

• How do we make it easy?

What is a Remote Module

• A web-based application that receives information from the display framework and can generate content to be shown on the display.

How do we decide what to display?

• Detect nearby users

• Prioritize recent arrivals

• Randomly choose a user

• Display user’s preferred content– remote content module– One of many content modules associated

with a user.

What can we do with this Architecture

• User contributed content modules– Phd comics– Smugmug– Google Photos (Picsa)– lastFM– Yahoo! Pipes based modules

PhD Comics Module

#!/usr/bin/rubyrequire 'rss/2.0'require 'open-uri'require 'rubygems'require 'json'

feed_url = "http://www.phdcomics.com/gradfeed_justcomics.php"print "Content-type:text/html\n\n"response = nilresult = niloutput = ""open(feed_url) do |http| response = http.readendresult = RSS::Parser.parse(response, false)item = result.items[rand() * result.items.size]ret = { "width" => "600", "height" => 150, "caption" => item.title + " - [A custom module by Ben]", "image" => item.description.match(/http:\/\/www.phdcomics.com\/comics\/archive[^\"]+/)[0] , "contentid" => item.link}print ret.to_json

Other application ideas

• Recommend content based on who’s around -- I.e. upcoming events YOU would be interested in

• Increase awareness of who’s around (I.e. who is in this building now.. )

• Your idea here!

Why is this interesting?

• Lots of interesting research questions

– Privacy, Presentation of Self (Goffman), end user programming, Patterns of use.

• Now we can explore this design space

Wrap Up

• Talked about public displays

• Described proactive public displays (audience-aware)

• Talked a little bit about prospero & C4

• Described a infrastructure to support the exploration of this design space

• You can help us do it!

Future Work

• Pervasive Simulator

– Build and Test ubicomp applications in different scenarios without needing to sensor an entire building.

• Hackfest

– Teaching members of SI how to build audience-aware applications to deploy on the displays

Acknowledgments• Prospero

– Paul Hartzog, Sayan Bhattacharyya, Charles Kaylor, Paul Resnick,

– Design Lab One, GROCS

• C4 – Joe McCarthy, Max Harper, Jiang Bian– Nokia Research Palo Alto

Questions?

Design Concerns

• Changing Context of use– From one user to many users

• Many Different User Needs– Aesthetic - Art– Utilitarian - Weather, News– Social

• Needs Dependent on Context

IBM BlueBoard - RFID Badge IBM BlueBoard - RFID Badge

Actions per day

image_clicked: 37 ( 5.3 per day) image_moved: 493 ( 70.4 per day) image_closed: 103 ( 14.7 per day)

filter_btn_click: 12 ( 1.7 per day) filter_content_confirmed: 7 ( 1.0 per day) rateup_btn_click: 115 ( 16.4 per day) ratedown_btn_click: 24 ( 3.4 per day)

top_ratings_visit: 5 ( 0.7 per day) top_ratings_goforward: 36 ( 5.1 per day)

top_ratings_goback: 1 ( 0.1 per day) play_btn_click: 2 ( 0.3 per day)

pause_btn_click: 0 ( 0.0 per day) admin_user_created: 1 ( 0.1 per day)

flickr_account_change_preferences: 4 ( 0.6 per day)

C4 Stats Nov 10th

In the past month (28 days):

pad0 (by Joe M.): 0 ( 0.0 per day)

pad1 (by Taneli M.): 106 ( 3.8 per day)

pad3 (by Server Room): 252 ( 9.0 per day)

pad4 (Narnia): 173 ( 6.2 per day)

pad5 (Kitchen): 519 ( 18.5 per day)

pad6 (by big bosses): 265 ( 9.5 per day)

pad7 (NE, by cubicles): 132 ( 4.7 per day)

pad8 (NE, end of hall): 48 ( 1.7 per day)