Supporting the shared experience of spectators through mobile group media

Abstract

Interesting characteristics of large-scale events are their spatial distribution, their extended duration over days, and the fact that they are set apart from daily life. The increasing pervasiveness of computational media encourages us to investigate such unexplored domains, especially when thinking of applications for spectator groups. Here we report of a field study on two groups of rally spectators who were equipped with multimedia phones, and we present a novel mobile group media application called mGroup that supports groups in creating and sharing experiences. Particularly, we look at the possibilities of and boundary conditions for computer applications posed by our findings on group identity and formation, group awareness and coordination, the meaningful construction of an event experience and its grounding in the event context, the shared context and discourses, protagonism and active spectatorship. Moreover, we aim at providing a new perspective on spectatorship at large scale events, which can make research and development more aware of the socio-cultural dimension.

Collective creation and sense-making of mobile media

“…This allows us to evaluate design approaches and report on emergent practices. We have carried out ethnographic studies, application development and field trials at a large-scale event with the aim of providing groups of spectators (at the World Rally Championship competition) with an application that combines mobile media "chatting" with the creation of shared media albums [6,7]. The field trial, which included observations of use, made it possible to analyze not only the content and interaction logs but also the situated use of the media.…”

Mobile Visual Communication

“…A moblog is like a weblog, but consists mainly of periodic posts of (user-taken) mobile phone photographs. The main idea of moblogging is that unlike with regular digital cameras, there is no intermediate transfer step between capturing the photo and publishing it (Jacucci et al, 2005). 5.…”

Sharing with people: a system for user-centric content sharing

“…The work of [16] provides one of the first large scale studies on user-generated mobile content sharing, while the authors of [27] study immediate sharing of mobile images to an organized web album. The work of [13] studies mobile content sharing in large groups of spectators. The Atomique proposal [8] is based on the key assumption that SWP also has, which is that content is not stored on a specific on-line sharing service, but across multiple repositories belonging to different services.…”