Back talk : an auditory environment for co-presence in television viewing

Abstract

Video content is being consumed in a host of new ways - viewers are no longer restricted to same-time or same-place viewing. However, the experience of watching content with a group is inherently a sociable one, and often desirable despite the physical distribution of group members. This thesis introduces Back Talk, a system designed to create a sociable television watching experience. We enhance television viewing with an auditory environment around a viewer - constructed from engagement and audio streams of co-viewers in the viewer's micro-social network. We have explored and leveraged the richness of audio to convey presence of remote viewers via a novel framework for capturing and translating engagement of an individual in the viewer's micro-social network into a set of audio cues that are played spatially around the viewer. This work presents the implementation scheme we used, and it also discusses results of a user study that was conducted to examine the impact and effectiveness of the Back Talk system.