This project seeks to explore the intersection of individual customization with presence. The aim is to enable the creation of more personal and richer forms of presence, with the aspiration that this will allow us to more deeply connect with our friends and family in a non-intrusive manner.
Presence is an important part of our day to day lives. Often we will have a sense of who is around us and what they are doing by the sounds of doors closing, cupboards banging, footsteps on floors, voices vaguely heard through walls, etc. In digital spaces, such as GUI desktops, presence enhances our sense of connection with geographical separate friends and colleagues. For example when you use an Instant Messaging (IM) client you see which friends are currently online or away, and when engaged in IM chat you are also told whether the people in the conversation are typing. On social network sites, such as Facebook, presence has a more explicit form. We are told what the people in our social network did, e.g. Mark joined the Ireland network, Eimear and Mike are now friends, etc.
As of yet presence tools don't enable us to control how our presence is represented. We don't have little coloured jewels (ambient presence avatars) spinning on our friend's desktops to show how fast we're typing, nor do we have a flower opening and closing in the jewel when we move the mouse, etc.
The outcome of this project should be parts of a framework that easily lets people create and share their presence avatars. There will be a desktop client like an IM client. The client watches whether you type, move the mouse, open windows, close windows, play music, etc. The specifics of what you type aren't recorded, instead your activity is used to update a presence avatar / Ambient Jewel. Your jewel updates, changes and transforms based on your actions. For example imagine everytime you open a window a flower blooms in your Ambient Jewel. Ambient Jewels are tiny. You share your ambient jewel with your friends. When you get a jewel from a friend you can hang it off your mouse pointer, use it to decorate your GUI windows, place them on the side of your screen, etc. Groups of friends are able to work together to group their jewels into larger jewels, and they can then coordinate how the collaborative jewel looks and behaves based on what they do on their desktops.
The core functionality is:
- Ambient Jewels (presence avatars) encode action
- people can create relationships between jewel transforms and their actions
- people can share these jewels with their friends
- jewels can be used to personalize GUI desktops
Potentially the jewels could be shared on people's blogs, websites and social network profiles.
Some research questions that arise:
- Does enabling people to personalise the presence avatars affect the importance and value people place on sharing their presence?
- How should the interface be designed for simplifying the process of creating relationships between user actions and how the avatars update?
- Does enabling people to decorate their desktops with their friends ambient jewels make desktops less socially isolated? By turning them into shared private spaces?
Previous coding / hacking experience writing GUI's and networking code is desirable. Candidates should be interested in learning about research in Human-Computer Interaction and Interaction Design. A creative streak, whether technical or artistic, is also useful.