Aroma

Abstract

The AROMA project is exploring the kind of awareness that people effortless are able to maintain about other beings who are located physically close. We are designing technology that attempts to mediate a similar kind of awareness among people who are geographically dispersed but want to stay better in touch. AROMA technology can be thought of as a stand-alone communication device or -more likely --an augmentation of existing technologies such as the telephone or full-blown media spaces. Our approach differs from other recent designs for awareness (a) by choosing pure abstract representations on the display site, (b) by possibly remapping the signal across media between capture and display, and, finally, (c) by explicitly extending the application domain to include more than the working life, to embrace social interaction in general.We are building a series of prototypes to learn if abstract representation of activity data does indeed convey a sense of remote presence and does so in a sutTiciently subdued manner to allow the user to concentrate on his or her main activity. We have done some initial testing of the technical feasibility of our designs. What still remains is an extensive effort of designing a symbolic language of remote presence, done in parallel with studies of how people will connect and communicate through such a language as they live with the AROMA system.

Interfaces with the ineffable

“…On the surface, Affector looks like an ambient display [Dey and de Guzman 2006;Pederson and Sokoler 1997] for emotional communication Angesleva et al 2004;Chang et al 2001], and indeed such work inspired us. But, the central goal for Affector was not to support the identification and transmission of emotional information through the system, but to support situated human emotional meaning-making around it.…”

Designing for Awareness in Interactions with Shared Systems

“…For example, Polyscope [13] and Portholes [29]-both among the first digital collaboration systems that presented explicitly designed awareness information-each show highly detailed photographs of a remote workspace to indicate presence and activity in those nonvisible sights. Their struggle with the limited bandwidth motivated research on more abstract information visualizations of presence [99], which lead to the realization that "effective communication matters more than communication bandwidth" [31:36]. Therefore, even though modern-day networking technologies no longer restrict information sharing, designers still need to carefully consider the optimal level of detail in the information.…”

“…A second benefit of using abstraction is that the information can become more calm and peripheral [99,127] by removing detail (also see Section 5.2.3 on presence of information). Pedersen and Sokoler [99], for example, describe abstraction (or feature degradation [75]) techniques for rich media (including pixelating, thresholding, feature extraction, and silhouetting). An implementation of such techniques can be seen in the work of Hudson and Smith [62], who design a shared audio channel where a speech audio signals are transformed into a soundscape.…”

“…By removing the intelligible words, muffling the sounds, filling in gaps and silences, they create a background sound that is much less disruptive than the full audio feed, yet still gives awareness about the presence and activity of co-workers. A third and last benefit of abstractions is that it can help to deal with privacy concerns [62,99]; see Section 5.1.4).…”

“…[62:248]. The tradeoff between awareness and privacy has discussed by many (e.g., [13,36,42,62,98,99]) and forms an important-arguably even the most important-topic of consideration when designing for awareness.…”