Hello everyone this is Huizhong Ye. I'm a second-year master student in Eindhoven
University of Technology. I'm glad to present the work-in-progress paper here, the topic about
enhancing the intimacy in remote coding experience through audio recordings. Shared meals as a
routine and a non-strategic social interaction in family life is very important for maintaining
relationships because they are associated with family closeness and the emotional well-being
of all members. However, it's hard for people to eat a meal together if they are apart. Especially
when mobility has become a feature of contemporary society, the number of geographically dispersed
families increased a lot. Most prior works focused on augmented reality based and multimedia
synchronous solutions, which lacks flexibility due to different schedules and even different
time zones of family members. Other systems display the recorded video of a remote activity
after a time shift. But the visual intervention of the video can be obtrusive since it neglects the
universal purpose of conversation in the scene. And there are also concerns about privacy issues.
Therefore we introduced using recorded audio to create an asynchronous coding experience
for family members in different locations. The audio includes all sounds emitted by any
person and item in the dining scene. To verify the hypothesis that the proposed asynchronous
approach helps people to enhance their intimacy, 24 participants were grouped into 12 pairs
in which the two participants are family members or very close friends.
They firstly have a meal separately meanwhile recording audio when eating.
Then they share the recorded audio with each other.
At last, they have another meal separately playing the audio from their partner.
After the experiment, all the participants evaluated their perception of intimacy in six
dimensions which are interpreted from Hassenzahl’s six strategies to mediate intimate relationships.
They also evaluated the eating together scenario and eating separately scenario as control groups.
In order to get deeper insights into the experimental scenario,
as well as to explore the design space of an interface for a remote family meal, we
conducted online workshops with six participants. In all dimensions, the perceived intimacy in the
eating with audio scenario reached a level that is significantly higher than eating separately.
From the data distribution, it's more obvious in the dimensions of awareness, care and value,
participation, and memories. Comparing the eating with audio scenario and eating together scenario,
there's no significant difference in the perception of memories,
which shows the potential similarity between eating with audio and the real eating together.
Through qualitative analysis we found that verbal communication was successfully aroused by this
approach, which results in a higher perception of expressivity, participation, and memories.
Regarding the asynchronous approach itself, many participants appreciated their partner's efforts
in recording, so they perceived higher key and value. In addition,
some participants wanted to take turns to record for each other continuously,
reflecting that this method can enhance the sense of participation for both parties.
To conduct the approach in a more embedded way, two interfaces were created for remote
coding scenarios according to the results of the experiment. Both interfaces are designed based on
placement, and with recording and playback as the basic functions. The difference is
that different sensors are integrated into the interfaces to support different interactions.
In this study we proposed an asynchronous approach that shows great potential in improving people's
intimacy with their remote partners. We discussed the effect of different sounds
on the six dimensions of intimacy, and created user interfaces to facilitate the interactions.
As a work-in-progress project, we will conduct further research on the use of the two designs
in the future. It will be interesting to compare them with other synchronous approaches and do
user tests in different situations, such as in a public space or involving multiple user scenarios.
Next to that, we need to take cultural factors and innovative bias into consideration in future
studies. For more details, please check our paper. Thanks for your attention.