Supporting Shared Family Experiences with Mobile Media Spaces

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Family members often want to participate in activities together that occur outside of the home. For example, they enjoy performing leisure activities together such as hiking or bicycling. Yet many family members are now living geographically apart. In these situations, it is very challenging for family members to participate in activities together outside of the home. Mobile video conferencing systems support these experiences at a basic level, yet are overly simplistic, challenging to use in real contexts, and often only support unidirectional video sharing.My proposed research explores the design of mobile media spaces to address this problem. Mobile media spaces are video conferencing applications that provide easy access to audio and video links to support the sharing of activities over distance between multiple mobile users. They rely on wearable mobile cameras (e.g., Google Glass, GoPro) or smartphones to stream video. For example, imagine being able to go for a run with a distant family member where you can talk to her and see what she sees, as though you are in the same place. Currently we know little of how such systems should be designed to address ease-of-use, privacy, safety, and user satisfaction in an effort to meet the needs of family members to feel connected over distance.First, I will investigate the user routines and needs that family members have for participating in activities together outside of the home through requirements analysis methodologies. Second, I will use this understanding to build a software infrastructure and research prototypes of new mobile media space applications. Third, I will evaluate the research prototypes through laboratory and field studies using mixed-methods evaluations. Together, this research will provide a detailed understanding of how mobile media spaces should be designed for shared family experiences, along with new methods for building such technically advanced video communication systems.This research is highly significant for we are starting to see mobile video conferencing emerge as an activity amongst family members. Companies are creating new mobile video streaming designs yet their design is often overly simplistic and typically only allows one person to participate in an activity while another watches. Thus, my research has the potential to inform a new genre of video streaming applications through an empirical understanding of how to best design such systems.