yanna vogiazou, marc eisenstadt, martin dzbor and jiri komzak knowledge media institute

Yanna Vogiazou, Marc Eisenstadt, Martin Dzbor and Jiri Komzak

Knowledge Media Institute

The Open University

Milton Keynes, UK

From BuddySpace to CitiTag: Large-scale Symbolic Presence for Community Building and

Spontaneous Play

SAC 2005 Ubiquitous Computing Track

16th March 2005

SAC 2005Ubiquitous Computing

Yanna Vogiazou Knowledge Media Institute, OU

Outline Enhancing social presence Design for emergence Our principles User studies

BuddySpace‘group belongingness’

BumperCars collaborative play

CitiTag emergence in the real world



Enhancing social presence

Engaging participatory social experiences – large scale

Presence-aware and ubiquitous technologies:

group cohesion

expression of spontaneous social behaviours through play

emergent group behaviours and participatory play

The ‘killer apps’ of tomorrow’s mobile infocom industry won’t be hardware devices or software programs but social practices.

(Howard Rheingold in Smart Mobs, 2002)



Design for emergence

Unpredictable behaviours and

uses of technology emerge from a combination of design and external factors through the deployment or experiment with an interactive product

SMS-dictated mobility

hijacking Bluetooth phones

iPod ‘Podcasts’ (time-shifted radio)

Social software




Our aim is to study emergence in a way that it becomes as important as the interactive application itself




The long-term goal is to try and integrate lessons learned from emergent user behaviours in future designs



Design Principles

Principle 1: Big scale is an asset, not a liability

Flash Mobs: more people the more engaging the experience



Design Principles Principle 2: Visualizing users’ locations can enhance the

sense of presence online

NASA EarthlightsHitMaps.open.ac.uk

World as a Blog



Design Principles

Principle 3: ‘Presence’ is largely symbolic

Online

Ubiquitous



BuddySpaceOur community building tool

Instant Messaging with location info

Automatic group and map generation

Very scalable and customizable

1000 OU online forum messages:

20% location-centric!



BuddySpace



BuddySpace

15 evaluation questionnaires from long term users (>6months)

Users were asked to rate ‘group belongingness’ engendered by 20 activities, situations, physical and digital artifacts.



BuddySpace

Automatically-generated groups: most beneficial and most frequently-used feature

Maps, personal rosters and group rosters ranked within top 5 (of 20) items

BuddySpace endorses our long-term goal of fostering a sense of ‘group belongingness’



BumperCar game

‘playground space’ for opportunistic, playful interaction bumping and chasing players change colour to indicate team alliance can change player speed, image background and add bot-cars to create different games overview map for scalability and presence

Normal view

Map view



3 Game types

Spontaneous Goal oriented

Colour Jam Session

Group Formations

Collaborative Pong

22 participants in 6 game sessions of approximately 20 minutes each. Questionnaires and video analysis were used.



Spontaneous collaboration

Synchronised colour change & movement

Teamwork: defenders & attackers

Surrounding

…through visual communication



Online ‘crowd’ behaviours

Rogues

Group Hug Place Swapping

Rogues and creativity

Mostcreative individual?

Spontaneous group and individual behaviours can emerge online, even without verbal communication.



Emergence in the real world

Can spontaneous behaviours emerge in the real world through a mixed reality game?

Motivation: a simple game based on symbolic presence states aiming to bring an enjoyable shared social experience, stimulated by real world interaction among players



Design Inspiration: ‘Tag’Touch has power in itself

Simple, spontaneous fun

Social



CitiTag: a wireless location based game

Looking around… Got tagged! Free a friend…

Two opposite teams, Reds vs Greens

WiFi + GPS



Two user studies

OU campus 9 participants, Bristol centre 16.

Group interviews, questionnaires, video analysis



CitiTag in Bristol

CitiTagBristol.mov



More results

Experience was different in the two locations (OU-action, Bristol-strategy)

Audio cues enhance the experience and support awareness Emergent/invincible team Authorising ‘child-like play’ in public among adults



Summary

BuddySpace fosters the feeling of being part of a group

Spontaneous group behaviours and coordination can emerge online through play without verbal communication

Similarly such behaviours can emerge in the real world, empowered by participation in a mixed reality shared experience, based on simple game rules and symbolic presence states .



Acknowledgements

…and our participants of course

Mathew Eanor

Jon Linney

Lewis McCann

Kevin Quick

Peter Scott

A special thanks to: Bas Raijmakers (Royal College of Art)

Erik Geelhoed

Richard Hull

Paul Marsh

Jo Reid

KMi HP Labs University of Bristol

Ben Clayton

Stuart Martin



Appendix

Feature Benefit Freq. Combo

Ability to change ‘Presence’ (online/away/etc) 4.07 3.13 3.60

Automatically-generated groups 3.60 3.20 3.40

The ‘Low attention/busy’ presence state 3.80 2.87 3.34

The ‘Online but elsewhere’ presence state 3.67 2.40 3.04

… [6 features omitted from this table for brevity] … … … …

ICQ/MSN/Yahoo/AIM transports/gateways 3.33 1.52 2.43

… [7 features omitted from this table for brevity] … … … …

Bookmarks 2.67 1.33 2.00

Buddyspace features ratings:



CitiTag architecture

XML Socket

Flash Communications Server running

CitiTag application (server-side scripts)

Serial data

GPS Receiver

Mobile Bristol Application

Flash Game Client

Wireless Network Access Point

Flash Administration

Client

PocketPC

802.11b wireless

connection

yanna vogiazou, marc eisenstadt, martin dzbor and jiri komzak knowledge media institute

Documents

spontaneous group

group rosters

play emergent group

individual behaviours

location infoautomatic

social practices

emergent user behaviours

spontaneous playyanna