Pluralizing the Screen: Converging Gesture, Environment ...uxtv2008.org/program/posters/LUNAR_UXTV08_ShortPaper_Poster.pdfbecause TV’s intimate relationship to people and the home

Pluralizing the Screen: Converging Gesture, Environment & Interface

Ron Goldin LUNAR

541 8th St San Francisco, CA 94103

415-252-4388

[email protected]

Alex Rochat LUNAR

541 8th St San Francisco, CA 94103

415-252-4388

[email protected]

Gretchen Anderson LUNAR

541 8th St San Francisco, CA 94103

415-252-4388

[email protected]

ABSTRACT

Through this case study, we illustrate how product immersion, user research, and cross-disciplinary collaboration help to unveil new market opportunities and evolve into a vision for new concepts in gesture-based interfaces which democratize the TV experience. New distribution channels along with increasingly powerful small devices and increased adoption of gesture-based interfaces allow for a more socially inclusive TV experience. With TV as the centerpiece of the modern home, physical and software interfaces should help humans make choices, not replace human choices.

Categories and Subject Descriptors K.8.2 [Computing Milieux]: Personal Computer – Hardware, Application Packages, Miscellaneous

General Terms Design, Experimentation, Human Factors.

Keywords Industrial Design, Interaction Design, Social TV, Remote Controls, Customization, Distributed, Media, Sharing.

1. INTRODUCTION

As a design firm that defends the user’s position at the forefront of our design process, we take pleasure in companies that approach us and share the belief that a user-centered design process will largely determine a product’s ability to thrive. One of the challenges continuing to face user experience professionals is articulating the relationship between immersion, research and the design requirements that these important steps help us to define. In the adolescence of a product, it must capture the hearts of executives, marketing professionals, technologists, and other designers, to name a few. The narrative for communicating design concepts to this broader audience is a highly collaborative and multi-disciplinary process in which interaction designers, industrial designers, graphic designers, and engineers each play a role in articulating the value of a proposed design, it’s ability to connect users to their needs, and evolving the form that the

product must take to bring the product to life by connecting with emotions and desires.

Interactive TV has been a challenging design area in part because TV’s intimate relationship to people and the home requires sensitivity to both social context and form, making it a particularly difficult context to innovate in. At the same time, iTV is seeing an exciting and unprecedented shift in how people think about the personal and social aspects of television, driven as much by the influences of the technologist’s tinker as the pop-culture influence of gaming, and its viral ability to challenge our notions of entertainment, play and collaboration.

In order to explore ways in which we could innovate in the interactive TV space, we began by taking a step backwards and investigated some of the ups and downs of TV’s history in the context of social interaction.

2. IMMERSION: AN EVOLUTION OF BEHAVIORS

Over the years, people have had a complex relationship with television. As with most technologies, what began as a military application found its home in the living rooms of the bleeding-edge consumer of the 1950’s, where most middle-class families could afford to have one television set, centrally located for the enjoyment of all. The American concept of the “TV Dinner”– a meal designed for quick, mess-free communal dining around Jackie Gleason and I Love Lucy – was also introduced in the 50’s, both a social avenue (it brought the family together around a common activity) as well as the potential for breaking down established social environments (it took away from the centuries-old social activity of eating around a table and communicating). As television prices dropped, it became more feasible for individual members of the household to have their own television and thus TV gained the potential for being a “private” activity. Each member could be found watching their program of choice in the privacy of their bedroom. The trend continues today with the proliferation of mobile devices that stream video clips and TV programming, designed for consumption by a single viewer.

3. USER RESEARCH: SHARED TV ENVIRONMENTS

With the dominant 1:1 ratio and the inherently anti-social experience you might expect as a result, observing users in context painted a very different picture of the social expressions present in TV watching. When we spoke to television enthusiasts, we found that for many, talking about a favorite show is a critical part of the excitement of TV. In a series of informal interviews, we spoke to TV enthusiasts and non-enthusiasts about the role television plays in their daily life. We found that like other forms of media consumption, television is a highly personal form of expression. Discussing the television show – at the school locker, at the water cooler, on a blog – is turning the sometimes solitary experience of TV watching into public dialog. It gives TV enthusiasts a sense of inclusion – and to some non-enthusiasts, a sense of exclusion, that they’re “missing out”.

We were particularly interested in the “public places” where TV is still very much a communal experience - hospitals, nursing homes, waiting rooms, college lounges and of course, the living room. With the cost of urban living ever increasing, the option of living with roommates in shared housing is still a reality for many 20-30somethings, who share not only space but often appliances and entertainment systems. In these environments, the biggest TV and the comfiest couch is in the communal space, to be shared by all.

In these environments, the paradigm of “it’s my television” is far less relevant or interesting than the synergies that happen when multiple individuals converge on a space and share a moment together. Through our research, we identified a potentially overlooked user with unmet needs – the Non-Enthusiast – and continued by investigating market trends to see where this user may be showing up in other places.

4. MARKET RESEARCH: NEW INTERACTION TRENDS

In a process of immersion, we explored market trends with potential to address the needs of both TV enthusiasts as well as our non-enthusiast in a semi-private TV social space. Two areas emerged which have both matured in terms of their technology and their early commercial traction were gesture-based interfaces and the world of gaming.

Gesture-based interfaces for TV shift our focus away from a hardware solution and instead think about space itself as the input device. In the summer of 2007, Dr. Prashan Premaratne from the University of Wollongong and Quang Nguyen from the Australian National University, Canberra, developed a camera that understands a series of hand gestures that control common television controls (for example, a “thumbs up” increments the channel). Not long after that, in the fall of 2007, JVC announced its “Clap TV”, a combination of hardware and software built into a TV that attempts to tackle the same problem space. In addition to gestures, JVC proposed some novel task-based interactions in which hand claps can tell the TV whether you are interested in changing the volume, the channel, or some other activity. A corresponding interface overlay on the screen serves as a display to help you understand what’s going on.

In both of these examples, the person interacting with the system is still very much the “holder of the conch” and has

complete control over the television experience. Enter the world of gaming.

The EyeToy, a peripheral video camera controller for the Sony Playstation 2, was showcased as early as 2002 and brought gesture-based gaming interactivity into the home. Its successor, the Eye (2007), was an even more versatile input device, featuring increased sensitivity to motion and directional sound tracking. Like the gesture-based remotes, this device turns the space itself into an interface. However, unlike the remote paradigm, where control tends to stay in the hands of a single individual, gamers are far more familiar with the multi-controller paradigm – collaboratively changing menus, choosing game characters – and by nature, the activity is more focused on play than who is in control. The Nintendo Wii continues down this path by giving each player a device in hand, still using the shared environment as its interface while spreading control among its players. It has been praised for being able to expand the gaming audience to non-gaming enthusiasts who might otherwise shun a device that’s too techy or complicated. By incorporating a simplified hardware interface, as well as a supporting a user interface that is clear and intuitive, it allows a social activity among a range of audiences that was unheard of a decade prior.

5. PERSONAS: BEYOND THE COUCH POTATO

Our research and immersion provided the seed for product design explorations in which we expand our primary persona beyond the clichéd couch potato to identify other unmet needs in the TV space. While the solo couch surfer may be accustomed to the ways of the grid of buttons on the remote and its complex relationship to the TV menu, how do we design for the guest who wants to flip channels with minimal learn time and frustration? Is there a way to design for the socially sensitive situation of a couple trying to decide what to watch together? For a larger group, how do we maximize the inherently social nature of the situation to get everyone involved and minimize the passive nature of TV watching? And though people tend to think about younger audiences as the “TV generation”, what are the needs of the elderly and disabled, in terms of ergonomics and vision impairments that can be solved through design?

Fig. 1. A couple negotiates what to watch by simultaneously

browsing for entertainment and queuing selections that cover both people’s interests.

6. DESIGN: SWIPE & SOFTREMOTE One design direction that emerged from these questions

was a world in which the holder of the remote, rather than being the “holder of the conch”, is one of numerous individuals that must share control within the TV environment. Consider the scenario where a couple with generally diverging tastes in TV watching want to spend the night in (Fig. 1, above). Taking the lead from the playful act of putting a quarter in the jukebox, we imagined a product where the couple can queue up media that they’re interested in watching the way they would a playlist. In a smart home, this is not simply limited to linear TV but perhaps photographs from your vacation or a few of your favorite Internet video clips. Like gaming, the experience we imagine is not one where people are battling for control but a playful environment of shared interactivity, afforded by the form and behavior of the input device and UI (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. “Swipe”: A removable touch screen. While one program is playing, photographs from a network are quickly organized and queued up for play.

Fig. 3. A group of friends, each with a personalized “remote”, are taking a more pro-active involvement with the TV watching experience.

Another design direction exploited the self-expressive aspect of sharing media. For this product concept, an individual’s remote is a window into their world. Rather than sinking into pure passive consumption, TV watchers seize opportunities for the kind of playful competition found in gaming. Jane is

decidedly bored with the TV show that’s on. She squeezes her keychain-sized remote and a simple wheel interface appears in a corner of the screen. With each squeeze, the remote glows and she navigates through her media looking for something interesting to fill the screen with. Sitting next to her, her friend pulls out his remote and squeezes it twice to start playing something from her selection. After watching it, he rotates his remote and selects “Grab” so he can watch it again later at home.

Fig. 4. “SoftRemote”: Several design expressions illustrating how SoftRemote can be worn as a fashion accessory. Several interaction concepts were explored, such as a push-button interface and a “squishy” interface that provides feedback.

Fig. 5. A “SoftRemote” interface wheel mimics the rotational motion of the “ball” concept, affording a limited number of

choices and a simple hierarchy for making selections.

TV’s have become so ubiquitous that they are “personal” or 1:1. New distribution channels like the Internet, along with increasingly powerful small devices that handle entertainment mean that this dynamic can change. Gaming and increasingly prevalent touchscreen / “soft” controls mean that people are becoming accustomed to a more democratic TV environment. Based on preliminary feedback on our concepts, we devise that controllers that unite disparate sources of TV content and give multiple people control can and will change how TV is viewed, making it more social and inviting different ways to “interact” including post-viewing discussions, sharing and commentary. In “The Design of Future Things”, Don Norman writes: “Before you know it, your home will expand its domain, recommending articles or television shows it thinks might interesting you. Is this how you want to lead your life?” With the TV as the centerpiece to the modern home, interfaces should help humans make choices, not replace human choices.

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