The Known Stranger

Abstract

Striking up a good conversation with new acquaintances is often difficult. In this paper we introduce a system that uses a ranking recommendation algorithm to generate real-time personalized topic suggestions during a conversation. The system then delivers the suggestions via Google Glass. We conducted a study with 38 pairs of strangers, who received such suggestions while conversing with a person they met for the first time. Participants found the suggestions to be helpful, but only at the right moments, and for certain types of speakers. Our results contribute to the understanding of how communication interventions influence people's experience and behaviors, and enhance interpersonal interactions. Our study also presents design implications for applications on wearable devices to facilitate conversations between strangers.

Collocated Sharing of Presentations of Self in Public Settings

“…Prior research had revealed that extroverts share more information in their profiles when augmenting conversations in face-to-face meetings [30]. However, similar to work on topic suggestions in conversations [39], our study hints towards the use of such information was less valuable to extroverts, as they do not need such support in conversations. Therefore, we see one opportunity in designing for supporting introverts in managing their social interactions.…”

“…Most design objectives for supporting face-to-face interactions, like increasing awareness or breaking ice in new encounters [40] have focused on design approaches with discrete interactions (e.g. topic suggestions [39]). As self-expression serves more than as a means to translate to more discrete interactions [14], a promising approach would be to design new forms of augmenting self-expression.…”

“…Such situated displays can create new encounters between strangers or support communication between peers [10,36]. While some systems share information to collocated others automatically [23,39], researchers have also looked at people sharing their self-curated information (images/text) [27][28][29]. These public, yet personal display systems appear in the form of augmented personal objects (e.g., coffee mugs [27], handheld devices [21] and tabletops [28]), as well as wearable technology (e.g., smartwatches [30,44], head-mounted displays [29,30], wearable displays [24,50] or commercial fashion accessories [32,45,52]).…”

Evolving the Ecosystem of Personal Behavioral Data

“…nurse, taxi driver), so building commonality earlier is better. Recent work has continued to explore this concept of computer-supported icebreaking (Nguyen, Nguyen, Iqbal, & Ofek, 2015), though not necessarily using location history.…”

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

“…Whilst this affordance of sharing a screen does not exist in the case of head-mounted display devices, they provide 'heads-up' interaction and can deliver information close to the line of sight [31,46]. They hence are unlike smartwatches and smartphones, which are elsewhere, such as on the wrist, in a pocket, or held in our hands.…”