Back talk : an auditory environment for co-presence in television viewing

Video content is being consumed in a host of new ways - viewers are no longer restricted to same-time or same-place viewing. However, the experience of watching content with a group is inherently a sociable one, and often desirable despite the physical distribution of group members. This thesis introduces Back Talk, a system designed to create a sociable television watching experience. We enhance television viewing with an auditory environment around a viewer - constructed from engagement and audio streams of co-viewers in the viewer's micro-social network. We have explored and leveraged the richness of audio to convey presence of remote viewers via a novel framework for capturing and translating engagement of an individual in the viewer's micro-social network into a set of audio cues that are played spatially around the viewer. This work presents the implementation scheme we used, and it also discusses results of a user study that was conducted to examine the impact and effectiveness of the Back Talk system.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Colaç̦o, Andrea B. (Andrea Brazilin Immaculate Danielle)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Chris Schmandt.

• Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/61939

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/61939