Title: Towards Proxemic Mobile Collocated Interactions
ArXiv ID: 1709.02014
Date: 2017-09-08
Authors: Researchers from original ArXiv paper
📝 Abstract
Research on mobile collocated interactions has been exploring situations where collocated users engage in collaborative activities using their personal mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets), thus going from personal/individual toward shared/multiuser experiences and interactions. The proliferation of ever-smaller computers that can be worn on our wrists (e.g., Apple Watch) and other parts of the body (e.g., Google Glass), have expanded the possibilities and increased the complexity of interaction in what we term mobile collocated situations. Research on F-formations (or facing formations) has been conducted in traditional settings (e.g., home, office, parties) where the context and the presence of physical elements (e.g., furniture) can strongly influence the way people socially interact with each other. While we may be aware of how people arrange themselves spatially and interact with each other at a dinner table, in a classroom, or at a waiting room in a hospital, there are other less-structured, dynamic, and larger-scale spaces that present different types of challenges and opportunities for technology to enrich how people experience these (semi-) public spaces. In this article, the authors explore proxemic mobile collocated interactions by looking at F-formations in the wild. They discuss recent efforts to observe how people socially interact in dynamic, unstructured, non-traditional settings. The authors also report the results of exploratory F-formation observations conducted in the wild (i.e., tourist attraction).
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Deep Dive into Towards Proxemic Mobile Collocated Interactions.
Research on mobile collocated interactions has been exploring situations where collocated users engage in collaborative activities using their personal mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets), thus going from personal/individual toward shared/multiuser experiences and interactions. The proliferation of ever-smaller computers that can be worn on our wrists (e.g., Apple Watch) and other parts of the body (e.g., Google Glass), have expanded the possibilities and increased the complexity of interaction in what we term mobile collocated situations. Research on F-formations (or facing formations) has been conducted in traditional settings (e.g., home, office, parties) where the context and the presence of physical elements (e.g., furniture) can strongly influence the way people socially interact with each other. While we may be aware of how people arrange themselves spatially and interact with each other at a dinner table, in a classroom, or at a waiting room in a hospital, there are
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Towards Proxemic Mobile
Collocated Interactions1
Andrés Lucero, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland Marcos Serrano, University of Toulouse - IRIT, Toulouse, France
ABSTRACT
Research on mobile collocated interactions has been exploring situations where collocated users engage
in collaborative activities using their personal mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets), thus going
from personal/individual toward shared/multiuser experiences and interactions. The proliferation of
ever-smaller computers that can be worn on our wrists (e.g., Apple Watch) and other parts of the body
(e.g., Google Glass), have expanded the possibilities and increased the complexity of interaction in what
we term “mobile collocated” situations. Research on F-formations (or facing formations) has been
conducted in traditional settings (e.g., home, office, parties) where the context and the presence of
physical elements (e.g., furniture) can strongly influence the way people socially interact with each
other. While we may be aware of how people arrange themselves spatially and interact with each other
at a dinner table, in a classroom, or at a waiting room in a hospital, there are other less-structured,
dynamic, and larger-scale spaces that present different types of challenges and opportunities for
technology to enrich how people experience these (semi-) public spaces. In this article, the authors
explore proxemic mobile collocated interactions by looking at F-formations in the wild. They discuss
recent efforts to observe how people socially interact in dynamic, unstructured, non-traditional settings.
The authors also report the results of exploratory F-formation observations conducted in the wild (i.e.,
tourist attraction).
MOBILE COLLOCATED INTERACTIONS
Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets were originally conceived and have traditionally been
utilized for individual use. Research on mobile collocated interactions (Lucero et al., 2013; Lucero et
al., 2016a) has been exploring situations in which collocated users engage in collaborative activities
using their mobile devices, thus going from personal/individual multi-device workflows (Santosa &
Wigdor, 2013) toward shared/multiuser experiences and interactions. Early research on mobile collocated interactions often encouraged people to share their devices to
create a collective experience or reach a common goal. Various physical and social contexts of use were
taken into account, such as teamwork at the office (Lucero et al., 2010), sharing media content at home
and outdoors (Clawson et al., 2008), and public expression in a theme park (Durrant et al., 2011) and in
1 This is a pre-print version of the following article: Andrés Lucero & Marcos Serrano. (2017). Towards Proxemic Mobile Collocated Interactions. International Journal of Mobile Human
Computer Interaction (IJMHCI) 9 (4), 15-24. http://dx.doi.org/10.4018/IJMHCI.2017100102
a pub (Lucero et al., 2013). More recently, researchers have been looking into simple ways to bind
devices together (Jokela et al., 2015), and have conducted ethnographic work to understand the use of
various mobile devices in collocated interactions (Porcheron et al., 2016). Most of this first-wave
research initially looked at the use of smartphones (and tablets) to study mobile collocated interactions,
and thus tended to be device-centric (Lucero et al., 2016a). The proliferation of ever-smaller computers that can be worn on our wrists (e.g., Apple Watch)
and other parts of the body (e.g., Google Glass, Microsoft HoloLens), have expanded the possibilities
and increased the complexity of interaction in what we term “mobile collocated” situations. These
include novel gestural interactions with wearables (Perrault et al., 2013) and interactions distributed
between wearables and handheld devices (Houben and Marquardt, 2015). As wearables gain popularity,
contexts in which groups of people are wearing and interacting with multiple wearable devices on their
body are becoming more commonplace. In those situations, people can use a rich ecosystem (Terrenghi
et al., 2009) of wearables that support collaborative tasks and experiences through multi-user
applications. Such novel mobile collocated interactions may include clothing, accessories, prosthetics,
and jewelry. One such example is It’s About Time (Pearson et al., 2015), which explores extending
smartwatch interactions to turn personal wearables into public displays. This current second-wave of
mobile collocated interactions is experience-centric (Lucero et al., 2016a).
A third wave of mobile collocated interactions research should address the pressing need to
understand the importance of spatial relationships between people and the digital devices in
