Social Textiles

Abstract

Wearable commodities are able to extend beyond the temporal span of a particular community event, offering omnipresent vehicles for producing icebreaking interaction opportunities. We introduce a novel platform, which generates social affordances to facilitate community organizers in aggregating social interaction among unacquainted, collocated members beyond initial hosted gatherings. To support these efforts, we present functional work-in-progress prototypes for Social Textiles, wearable computing textiles which enable social messaging and peripheral social awareness on non-emissive digitally linked shirts. The shirts serve as catalysts for different social depths as they reveal common interests (mediated by community organizers), based on the physical proximity of users. We provide 3 key scenarios, which demonstrate the user experience envisioned with our system. We present a conceptual framework, which shows how different community organizers across domains such as universities, brand communities and digital self-organized communities can benefit from our technology.

Head-mounted Displays, Smartphones, or Smartwatches? -- Augmenting Conversations with Digital Representation of Self

“…As the participant numbers differ between groups, the data were normalised to be representative. Our participants consisted of 20 males and eight females (M = 27, range [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39]. Most users were strangers (91%), with 7% being friends and 2% classified as 'known people' (familiar strangers).…”

“…In line with prior work, we used a relations questionnaire, asking our participants whether they knew any of the other people taking part, to model the participants' social relationships [23,31,32]. In previous studies [6,12,[19][20][21][22]24] participants were required to be strangers (defined as PACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 3, No.…”

Hooze

“…Perhaps the most characteristic interaction Hooze facilitated was that of sharing a moment. Much of the footage we captured to document the project depicts the designers engaged in an intimate hug, or gazing into each other's eyes (for example, see Figure 7,8,11). Upon reflection, we feel the shared moments Hooze helped create were a special way for two individuals to focus upon each other in the midst of humorous play.…”

“…For example, using simple components, the Massage me Shirt [14] transforms a tshirt into a video game controller supporting physical interaction between individuals. Social Textiles [11] a social messaging enabled shirt aggregates people for event planning. Notably, the Mediated Body project [10] converts bodies into musical instruments, facilitating social play and interpersonal touch.…”

Visible Position Estimation in Whole Wrist Circumference Device towards Forearm Pose-aware Display

“…Wearables attached to a user's body as everyday objects, like a watch, a shirt, shoes, a bracelet, and so on, allow the user to be monitored and/or informed anytime, anywhere. Various such applications have been proposed for healthcare and fitness [11,32,45], social interaction [5,20,21,25], work support [37], safety awareness [1,15], education/training [8,36] and notification of messages. In particular, wrist-worn devices are very popular, boosted by the cultural affinity to watches and bracelets.…”