Mediated Atmospheres

Abstract

Atmosphere - the sensorial qualities of a space, shaped by the composition of light, sound, objects, people, etc. - has remarkable influence on our experiences and behavior. Manipulating it has been shown to be powerful, affecting cognitive performance, mood and even physiology, our work envisions and implements a smart office prototype, capable of digitally transforming its atmosphere - creating what we call Mediated Atmospheres (MA) - using computationally controlled lighting, video projection and sound. Additionally, we equipped this space with a modular real-time data collection infrastructure, integrating a set of biosignal sensors. Through a user study (N=29) we demonstrate MA's effects on occupants’ ability to focus and to recover from a stressful situation. Our evaluation is based on subjective measurements of perception, as well as objective measurements, extracted from recordings of heart rate variability and facial features. We compare multiple signal processing approaches for quantifying changes in occupant physiological state. Our findings show that MA significantly (p<0.05) affect occupants’ perception as well as physiological response, which encouragingly correlate with occupants’ perception. Our findings is a first step towards personalized control of the ambient atmosphere to support wellbeing and productivity.

Exploring Smart Agents for the Interaction with Multimodal Mediated Environments

“…We designed four systems that differ in the input modality (graphical vs. voice vs. text) and the system intelligence (basic vs. advanced), as visualized in Figure 1. As shown in a top-level description of our setup in Figure 2, the agents communicate with Mediated Atmospheres, a smart office prototype that was introduced in previous work [8].…”

“…Mediated Atmospheres is a modular workspace capable of digitally transforming its appearance using controllable lighting, video projection, and sound. We combine all digital output capabilities to design a library of scenes, multimodal virtual environments, with each of them possibly having a different influence on our physiology or behavior [8]. Examples of the workspace, transformed into different scenes, are shown in Figure 3.…”

“…As one scenario of an intelligent, adaptive environment, we use Mediated Atmospheres, a modular workspace proposed by Zhao et al [8]. It aims to dynamically influence the users' abilities to focus on a specific task or to recover from a stressful situation.…”

“…In contrast, employees reported that having more freedom in choosing their workplace leads to a higher level of satisfaction, innovation, and effectiveness [9]. Utilizing Mediated Atmospheres, different environments can be projected into the room according to the occupants' preferences or different work scenarios in order to foster creativity, productivity, and relaxation [8].…”

Understanding the Experiences of Remote Workers: Opportunities for Ambient Workspaces at Home

“…LumenAR (Huber, 2014) and FACT (Huber, 2014) are projects that explore potentials of portable AR projection to assist with work tasks while extending the display. Projection can also work in large displays (Pousman and Stasko, 2006;Perteneder et al, 2016;Petford et al, 2016;Zhao et al, 2017); ASPECTA Toolkit (Petford et al, 2016) explores low-cost ways to create large projected displays that adapt to any room.…”