Video mediated social interaction between groups: System requirements and technology challenges

Abstract

This paper discusses results from research related to the use of television as a device that supports social interaction between close-knit groups in settings that include more than two locations, each location being potentially equipped with more than one camera. The paper introduces the notion of a framing experience, as a specific scenario or situation within which social communication takes place. It reports on the evaluation of some of the key attributes of social communication through semi-structured interviews, with 16 families across four European countries. The inferences drawn from this study are reduced to four system capabilities including the ability to support: excitement, engagement and entertainment; high quality, reliable audiovisual communications; flexibility and adaptability sufficient to support the unpredictable and reactive nature of human interaction and discourse. These system requirements are, in turn, reduced to a number of technology challenges which if solved will help enable effective social communications between groups, mediated by the television. These technology challenges include: high quality reliable audio visual communication; interaction orchestration, multimedia interpretation and multimedia composition. Finally the paper reflects on the impact the use of framing experiences, such as those described here, could have on strategy and policy for service providers and regulators.

Introduction

The premises of this work is that in the future, ‘n’ disparate households will be connected, so friends and family members can enjoy some shared activity. The households will be equipped with cameras and microphones for capturing scenes that will be transmitted (that is uploaded to the network, recombined, and delivered) back to ‘n’ households. The shared activity will be represented in the remote locations using amplifiers, speakers, and a television screen. This is represented in Fig. 1.

The research seeks to improve social interaction between groups of people in different locations by developing, evaluating and refining appropriate technologies. We intend to perform evaluations within a range of defined technology mediated social interactions we call framing experiences.

The paper considers relevant state of the art related to the role of the television, to social science theories related to human behaviour, to results from previous family studies, to interactive television, video conferencing, and even some practices in television production.

The main assumption of this article, the increasing need for supporting remote social interaction between friends and family members living in disparate locations, is largely supported by recent statistics. According to Eurostat,⁵ in 2007 14% of the European households consisted of single adults living alone, while the Census Bureau⁶ from the USA published that one in four households consisted of one person living alone in the year 2000. Nevertheless, as reported by the prestigious Pew Research Centre,⁷ thanks to the communication revolution, bonds remain strong even though family forms change.

Original results reported here include those from interviews with families exploring their social communications habits as well as an assessment of how some of the findings from our research can be interpreted as placing new demands on the technology used for the capture, transmission and representation of remote scenes.

The results reported from the family interviews are consistent with a view that using technology to support remote interaction between groups for social purposes may be attractive if there is a shared activity that binds the ‘n’ households (the framing experience).

The family interviews suggest that any system supporting such framing experiences must be able to deliver:

• Engagement, excitement and entertainment

• Flexibility

• Control and usability

• High quality, reliable audio visual communications

We suggest that these attributes can be delivered through user centred design and through a new attribute we call communication orchestration. Communication orchestration refers to an automatic reasoning process that controls:

• what is captured by the cameras in each location

• what is edited for presentation on the TV screen and for reproduction through a spatial audio system at each location

Whilst improving social communication may appear to be an inherently valuable goal, this research is also driven by a simple profit motive. Even though the delivery of TV over the Internet is the focus of much corporate telecoms activity, communication, remains more profitable than media delivery (Odlyzko, 2008). The ultimate goal of this work is to explore new forms of rich social communication that will go far beyond the tools for social group communications such as Facebook⁸ and Twitter⁹ by employing the richness and transparency of video conferencing. Following the state of the art section, three experimental sections are described. These include:

• The development of framing experiences

• The family interviews

• Inferences for system capabilities and for technology challenges

For each of the above the method and results are presented. These are followed by a section discussing usage and policy implications and finally our conclusions.