Who's the Fairest of Them All

Abstract

In the UK alone smartphone adoption has reached 61% in 2014. In home and living-room contexts, this adoption has led to "multi-screening", meaning the concurrent use of devices such as smartphones and tablets alongside the TV. The resultant private "digital bubble" [12] of this device usage has been discussed as raising a problematic barrier to socialization and interaction, with mobile phone use in particular having significant anti-social connotations [24]. However mobile devices have evolved new capabilities for sharing their activity, most notably through screen mirroring. This paper explores how we can utilize the TV to view screen-mirrored device activity, decreasing the digital isolation of device usage. We examine the extent to which users can attend to multiple devices on one TV, the effect this and prior systems have had on existing TV viewing, and propose ways in which we can aid users to manage their viewing of device activity on the TV. Moreover, we examine new approaches toward the accessibility of device activity, investigating systems which allow users to attend to whichever device activity they wish using multi-view displays, and discuss the social and privacy implications of having "always-on" screen-mirrored devices.

Augmenting TV Viewing using Acoustically Transparent Auditory Headsets

“…• Visually-oriented synchronous experiences across multiple devices [30,40,41,66] and headsets [18]; • Visually-oriented augmentations e.g. enhancing accessibility for TV [65,74] and immersive content [37], altering the surrounding environment for immersion [6], enhancing TV commercials [11], presenting other content [11,27,28,63] and other augmentations around the display, such as rendering elements of the program in 3D, or rendering holograms of others [51]; • Augmentations delivered synchronously that are not necessarily semantically linked to the underlying TV content. For example, social TV [7] has repeatedly utilized synchronized TV experiences at-a-distance alongside additional audio communication channels to allow shared, at-a-distance TV viewing e.g.…”

“…If viewers have a shared spatial audio space, we might imagine more engaging experiences being designed to take advantage of this, appropriating the TV speakers much as with the BBC Vostok-K experience [12][13][14]21]. Even prior work regarding active multi-view displays [27,28] could be re-assessed, given we can now deliver both personal private visuals and audio.…”