A review of collocated multi-user TV

Abstract

The TV plays a central role in our homes, bringing friends and family together by providing a common reference point for live, on-demand and interactive media. However the capabilities of the modern day TV poorly reflect this social, multi-user context. The TV is in the process of being supplemented, and in some cases replaced, by other devices and displays (e.g. phones, tablets) in what is termed "multi-screening". This allows users to engage in separate and private activities alongside TV usage. The result of this is that users are "together alone" inhabiting private digital bubbles, their activity and interactions cut off from those around them. This paper outlines why facilitating multi-user use of the TV is important within the context of existing multi-screen usage, and reviews how we might go about designing TVs that better support the social contexts in which they reside. Firstly we discuss how we interact with and share use of the TV, before examining how our TV usage has been augmented by multi-screening. We then review designs for multi-user TV: from shared use TV interfaces, to using the TV as a medium by which multi-screen activity can be shared, to TVs capable of providing multiple independent physical views, allowing for both private and collaborative activity on a single shared display. Finally we discuss new technologies that might have a part to play in determining the future role of the TV. This paper demonstrates that, contrary to existing usage, the TV can be of increasing relevance in the multi-user, multi-screen era.

Trends in U.S. Adolescents’ media use, 1976–2016: The rise of digital media, the decline of TV, and the (near) demise of print.

“…texting and on the Internet in both categories. There is some evidence that iGeners’ TV time increasingly consists of multiscreen time (Andò, Pizza, & Corsini, 2016; Dias, 2016; Marinelli & Andó, 2014; McGill, Williamson, & Brewster, 2015; Segijn, Voorveld, Vandeberg, & Smit, 2017), but such a trend in use would seem unlikely to result in the inverse relationship observed in this study between legacy and digital media. In addition, the measure of texting is limited, as it asks about time spent rather than number of messages sent and received.…”

Augmenting TV Viewing using Acoustically Transparent Auditory Headsets

“…• Visually-oriented synchronous experiences across multiple devices [30,40,41,66] and headsets [18]; • Visually-oriented augmentations e.g. enhancing accessibility for TV [65,74] and immersive content [37], altering the surrounding environment for immersion [6], enhancing TV commercials [11], presenting other content [11,27,28,63] and other augmentations around the display, such as rendering elements of the program in 3D, or rendering holograms of others [51]; • Augmentations delivered synchronously that are not necessarily semantically linked to the underlying TV content.…”

Designing Visual Complexity for Dual-screen Media

“…Recent work [11,34,37] has studied such multi-device use cases proliferating the modern living room more formally. They detail great diversity of use -users often browse related, semi-related and nonrelated information on a secondary device (see [25] for a classification). In general, companion applications provide timerelevant facts and information, interactive play-along games, and live social media reaction, which often update at specific points in a programme.…”