- Can I start?
Okay, good.
Hi everyone, thanks for coming to my talk
and this session.
My name is Teddy Seyed, I'm a PhD student
at University of Calgary and this work is in collaboration
with Dr. Xing-Dong Yang from Dartmouth
and Dr. Dan Vogel from Waterloo.
So our work is essentially a modular smartphone for lending,
and at a very high level that means we're using
modularity to improve trustworthiness
and convenience when we're sharing our smartphones.
So this is probably seen very often.
You've probably already done it at this conference,
and you're probably going to do it more
during this conference.
And this is the idea that we're all around a table,
we're eating our food, having a drink,
just generally chillin', and we're using our devices.
Now when we're using our devices, we're sharing emails,
we're sharing pictures, we're maybe playing a game
or showing a screenshot, things like that.
So sharing happens quite often
and more often then you think.
So from a lot of the related work
we've seen sorta three key areas.
The first is that family relationships really influence
how desktop computers are being shared.
So in the case of a husband and wife,
they would share their desktop differently
than they would a husband and his child.
Secondly, things like basic apps are the things
that are shared most commonly.
So things like maps, browsers, music, a Spotify playlist,
or even games.
Lastly, culture plays a serious role as well in terms
of how we share our devices.
So in the cases of India, where there may only
be one phone in the household, how they're sharing
that device is different.
As well, your background and culture
also influences how you share.
There's also this notion of trust and convenience,
which is something I mentioned at the very beginning,
and this plays a huge role in how we share our devices.
So in this example, I'm gonna highlight a specific scenario.
So lets say the person on the right using their tablet
and their phone dies, or their tablet dies.
Now the person on the left wants to lend their phone
to the person on the right, but it's really inconvenient
for him because of distance.
He may feel uncomfortable because he's so far away
from his device.
Next, we can look at convenience.
So let's imagine these two ladies on the left
are both really close friends
and they've kind of grown up with each other.
The person on the right is someone who's kinda
new to the group and doesn't really understand
or really know everyone in the group very well.
Now the two on the left are probably very familiar
with each other and so they share things quite often,
but they might feel very uncomfortable in terms of trust,
sharing some stuff with the person on the right.
So this is what I mean by the balancing move
between trust and convenience.
Now, we know from related work that there
is a sense of risk between the lender and the lendee.
So in terms of the lender, there's a risk in the sense
that if I give my phone away to someone,
I might worry that I may not get it back
or I don't know what they're doing.
But on the flip side for the lendee,
if someone's borrowed my phone and they've logged
into their email, if they forget to log out of their email,
it might actually feel kinda weird,
or they might feel kind of risky.
Proximity actually dictates significantly in terms
of how we share our devices.
So if someone's right beside me and I share my device,
I'm probably more willing and more comfortable.
But if they're further away, I might be more awkward
because I don't know what's going on on that screen.
Lastly, we've kind of seen the fact that Android
already uses things like guest mode and guest sharing
in their operating system.
But things like multi-account,
they're not used very well,
and we've seen work from Brush and ink pen that this
is actually user-unfriendly.
This is very very difficult to basically
continue your session, log out of your phone,
and then hand it over to someone,
so it's unfriendly.
Now on the research side, we've had a few influences.
We've looked at things like Codex, Paddle,
Siftables, and Doppio.
They're using multiple screens,
but are not really focused on sharing.
On the commercial side, we have things like
Project Ara from Google, Motorola Z, and LG G5.
So these are all commercially available,
they're all modular devices.
However, they're looking at using modularity
to upgrade their phone, or increase functionality.
Whereas we're using modularity to basically turn your
device into a shareable thing.
Now before I jump into the cool demos and videos,
I'll talk a little bit about our grounding work.
So this is a work that we did that inspired a lot
of the work that we did later on.
So the first thing we did was an exploratory study.
So we looked at how people share their devices,
what apps they were sharing, how the relationships
that influenced their sharing, things like that.
So our exploratory study was first a 15 minute survey
that we used Survey Monkey for with 54 participants
who were all from the states.
We basically framed our lending scenarios
in three different scenarios.
So these are all based off of prior work.
So these are scenarios that looked at family
or close friends, co-workers or classmates, and strangers.
So you can imagine sharing is going to be substantially
different in each of these three scenarios.
So we gave people these three scenarios,
we looked at two techniques.
The first being handing your phone over unlocked
to someone, and the next one being using a guest mode.
So something that's already available in Android.
So we asked people to think about how they were lending,
different sort of context, and how they were sharing.
At the very end of the survey, we then introduced
the concept of lending, and whether that would
be a good future direction.
So from our work, we've basically had three key takeaways.
The first is that we essentially confirmed a lot
of the related work in terms of relationships
did play a big role in how people shared their devices.
So if they were really close to someone,
it was basically all or nothing.
All being you handed someone your phone over unlocked,
or nothing at all.
The next was comparing unlocked
phone techniques versus modularity.
We saw that people actually preferred using
the modular approach in the scenario
with a co-worker or classmate.
And lastly, people were generally unwilling
to share their device with people they didn't know.
So we can kind of already see in this initial work
that we're actually kind of framing
how a device might actually work for future modular devices.
Following that, we actually did a pretty cool study
which is looking at how we can detach things,
how we break things apart, and we called that
a modular design study.
So we came up with six different designs
of how you would actually modularize a phone,
and I'll kind of jump into each of those in a second.
So the first was what we call the back-to-back design.
So this is a phone with two screens facing
the opposite direction and you can kinda slide it off.
The next was sort of the SIM card design,
so there's SIM card large, which is on the right,
and a SIM card small which is on the left.
So it's just different sizes of the modular piece,
and this works very similar to a SIM card where
it just kind of pops out from the side.
The next, and I personally found the most interesting,
was the idea of multiple pieces.
So you have a six-piece, a four-piece, and a two-piece,
and as you can tell, they kinda each
basically break apart differently.
On the one on the right, the far right, the two-piece,
it kind of breaks in half.
So in our study for this design, we had 12 participants,
they were aged 20 to 35.
We asked them a bunch of follow-up questions
very similar to our initial study where we looked
at the different scenarios.
We asked them how they'd be using
these different designs in different scenarios.
We got them to try it out and then they ended up
ranking their favorite design.
So generally from this study,
we had really encouraging results.
So people were definitely more encouraged to share,
and they had the feeling of more control,
especially in this case of the stranger.
So now that we know that people
definitely want to share more,
and that there's a sense of control,
that kind of gives us a grounding
to actually continue more work in building a future device.
Now in terms of the ranking,
we saw some interesting results.
So my personal favorite was the six-piece design,
which only had 4% sadly,
but the one that was preferred the most
was the SIM card design large with 41%,
followed by the back-to-back at 24,
and the SIM card small at 19.
What's also interesting is you can kinda see,
and I'll touch on it a little bit later,
is that the multi-piece designs were ranked the lowest.
And interestingly, the 2% one, I'll kinda touch on later,
wasn't really well received at all.
So I won't have a lot of time to talk about all
of the findings we had from our modular design study,
but there's eight main takeaways
that I'll touch upon really briefly.
So the first was this notion of
retaining a piece increases trust.
So right now, with the smartphone currently,
I give away my phone
and I've kinda lost the sense of trust.
But if I maintain a piece of that phone and I give it away,
I still feel like I have something with me.
So that means there's kind of a level of trust
that really wasn't there before.
The next one was this notion
of controlling trust piece by piece size.
So this was interesting to me because,
something I hadn't thought of until we had done our study,
where it meant when I gave away a bigger piece to someone,
that meant I trusted them more.
And if I gave them away a smaller piece,
I trusted them a bit less.
Now on the flip side for a lendee,
their trust is now visible to me.
So if I know that you have a bigger piece,
and you've given me a smaller piece,
I know you trust me less.
So I thought that was really cool.
Something else that came up quite often
was the idea that people really wanted to monitor the piece.
So even if was a secure Sandbox device,
they still wanna be able to know
what someone was doing on that device
just for that sense of security and trust.
We also saw people were interested in sharing other content.
So it's not just about splitting apart a phone
and giving a piece of it away,
but now it's the notion that you're actually
sharing content as well.
There was this notion of keeping a complete phone,
and this is why I mentioned the modular pieces,
or the multi-piece designs failed horribly,
was because people really wanted
to feel that they had a complete phone.
So if you can imagine the piece that had two screens
and they split it in half, I go from having a complete phone
to a phone that it feels like half.
So now the lendee feels like they have half a phone,
and the lender feels like they have half a phone.
Next there was this notion of master and slave
that came up quite often where the main piece
was always the master and the secondary piece
was always the slave.
And lastly, form factor was also
an important aspect as well.
So I'll touch on it a little bit briefly
in the next slide, but in terms
of the two-piece and the four-piece
and the six-piece, the important part of there
was aspect ratio wasn't maintained
when you're splitting apart the device.
So it may go from being a complete 16 by nine device
to a smaller four by three.
So from all this, we essentially generated
design considerations on both the hardware side
and the software side.
So I'll talk about the hardware side really briefly.
So I've kinda touched upon this already,
but modules should maintain the aspect ratio,
especially in the multi-piece designs.
Larger piece is implicit you mean more trust,
and also interestingly,
smaller pieces mean limited functionality.
So if I know that I trust you less,
it doesn't really make sense
to give full functionality to the smaller piece.
So by inherently, that means the smaller piece
should have limited functionality.
In terms of modularity, we really saw that people
didn't prefer breaking apart the phone,
and I'll kinda touch upon that at the finality
of this conclusion or of this talk,
but essentially sliding is far more preferred
than it is breaking apart.
In terms of lending, people really wanted
lending to be integrated into the OS,
so we've kinda seen that already with Android
and having their guest mode,
so kinda similar concept of keeping it
really integrated fundamentally into the OS.
The ability to remove to lend a device,
but also keep it fully customizable.
So this means detaching should really be easy
with the device and it should sort of switch
into a mode already but then also customizing
for the different lending modes that are available.
So we already have friends and family,
co-workers and classmates, and then strangers.
So switching between those modes should be really easy.
Again, kind of having that sort of control
between the lender and the lendee.
So the lendee should also feel safe.
So the idea that the lendee has logged into their email,
and once that device is returned, it should log them out.
And also the idea that roles should be swapped.
So if I trust someone enough and I give them
the bigger piece, that shouldn't be a problem
for me to switch to the smaller piece.
So now we jump into the cool stuff that I really like,
and that's the actual prototype.
So you can kinda tell, I want something,
oh it didn't play.
So this is our 3D printed prototype,
it's a little bit larger than we wanted.
Essentially it houses a Nexus 6, a phone,
and there's sliding rails in between.
You can slide it out to the left, it pops up a menu,
there's also a smaller piece,
that is the smaller piece,
oh there we go.
So yeah, this is the 3D printed piece,
as you can kinda tell, it's a little bit large.
Nexus 6, there's sliding rails in the back.
As you can kinda tell, we're playing off the idea
of a smaller piece and a bigger piece.
The larger piece is a Nexus 4 that slides in,
and there's a smaller piece as well.
That slides in as well.
So here, we're already playing with the idea that
there's a larger piece, bigger piece.
So next, I'll kinda jump into some examples
of what it means to be sharing your device.
So in this example, I'm essentially gonna do
what I talked about earlier, where I pull the device off,
and it's really easy to lend.
So in this case, the minute I pull it off,
it's gonna default to a menu, and if I pull it further,
it's gonna default into what we call a guest mode.
You can kinda see the icon's locked.
So we basically give access to things like
maps, phone calls and pictures.
So things that are very common
that you don't really need access for right away.
So you pull it out, there's a little menu,
if I pull it further, it's gonna default
to the guest mode, and I can take it.
Next, there's a bunch of guest modes,
or lending modes that I kinda mentioned earlier.
So things around family and friends, co-workers, et cetera.
So there's a bunch of different modes
that are available in our little menu.
The first one is app lending, which is basically
lending an app directly.
So you can imagine I open up Gmail,
and I select lending, I can give that app away.
So this might be useful for scenarios where
I don't really know how to answer an email,
and I want someone else to type it up for me,
they can do that.
Guest mode is essentially what you saw earlier,
where it's just straight detaching
but now you can select it explicitly.
Next is full access, where it's full access
between both devices, so they're essentially
the same device.
After that is screen sharing,
where it's just sharing the screen one-way
and swapping control.
So app lending works the following way.
So let's say I open up Gmail and I'm browsing my email,
and someone wants to browse and check their email.
So pull it off to the side, you can select the app lending,
it'll open up Gmail.
So here, as I mentioned before, it's a really easy way
to select just the Sandbox application
for a specific scenario.
So in this case, me just sharing the email app only.
So there is also this notion of requesting access
that we've talked about quite often during the paper.
And this is the notion that if things are Sandboxed
and someone requests access for an application, it happens.
So I'll just show you a quick example.
So I pull it off straight to be in guest mode.
I'm gonna open up Gmail, and now it's gonna tell me
that I can't open it,
and I need to request access.
So this then goes directly to the phone,
and it's integrated into the OS as a notification,
and I can either say yes or no.
So I click yes, and the app will be approved
on the secondary device, and then you can use it.
Screen sharing is just a one-way sort of demonstration
of how screen sharing would work
on an application like this.
So the idea here is just one-way,
it's really good for things like showing how to
use a phone if someone doesn't know
how to access a specific feature,
or showing the phone, phone pictures, and album.
Full access, as I mentioned before,
is just essentially mirroring both phones,
and giving full access to the device,
but very Sandboxed.
So select the unlock icon, and they'll both be equal.
So one of the things I mentioned before
was the ability to monitor the pieces.
And so, regardless of where you are in a lending session,
there is a notion that things are always monitored.
So at the very top, there's always a persistent notification
of what's going on on the secondary piece's screen.
You can kinda see it as a notification,
and you can open it up fully.
And you can also look at an activity log,
if they opened up other apps during their lending session.
Lastly, lending the small piece is a little bit different
than the bigger piece.
So I've already mentioned before
that the smaller piece should, by definition,
already have limited functionality.
So we've kind of already done that in this case,
where the guest mode, by default,
is really essentially just phone,
that's all that can ever be accessed.
So this is that scenario where you're lending the phone
to someone on the street, you don't really know them.
You can pull it off and select it.
Now also, we can still do the same sort of swap scenario
that I mentioned before, where if I trust someone fully
and I only ever wanna use the small piece,
I can swap control, full control.
So that's selected by pulling it off
and getting the secondary menu, selecting swap.
Now you can kinda see the icons are locked again,
so it's a guest mode by default on the larger screen.
And the smaller piece retains the full functionality
of the bigger piece with notifications
and everything else included.
So for future work, there's a few different things that
we can do.
I definitely wanna make it thinner
than what you see in the prototype,
and I know how to do that now,
but in the purposes of admitting for (mumbles)
you have to do what you have to do.
Alternative designs, so looking at even more modularity.
So I really like the six-piece design,
but obviously it wasn't really well received,
but I think in scenarios where there's more sharing
or maybe multiplayer gaming, it might actually
be a really cool way to do modularity on a phone.
There might actually be other sharing influencers,
so we only looked at trust and convenience
'cause that seemed to be the biggest issue
with sharing devices today,
and so we could definitely do other ones.
We only looked at lending, we didn't really look
at lending content within applications.
So that might be something where we look at sharing
a photo album within the actual applications of the devices.
We also didn't really look too much at real world usage.
We did very limited user studies in a lab,
that's something we could explore further.
So to conclude, we explored the design space
of a modular smartphone, and we demonstrated
how this can be improved to enhance trust
and convenience in devices today.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
- So we can take a few questions
if you just go up to the microphone.
As we're waiting for that brave person,
just a quick question.
Did the people that you were studying know that when
they shared a piece of their phone
that their phone would be degraded in some ways,
or was it the design was that they would always
have the same robust functionality on their phone?
- Yeah, they knew, they knew.
- So the idea was they'd would have the same,
- Yeah the idea was that they would have a very
Sandboxed sort of environment 'cause you didn't want
to give them full access
to information on the main piece.
- [Man] Right
- So it was ever meant to be a Sandboxed instrument.
- Right, and the second question is
was there a scenario where you thought
this design worked the best in terms of
a particular use case that you thought,
oh this is a really sweet spot?
- Yeah, so a lot of the people that had kids
or parents essentially thought this would be
the best case device where you could detach
the piece and give it to the child
and it'd be very Sandboxed, they couldn't ever install
thousands of dollars worth of apps or things like that.
- [Man] Great, ah we have one person.
- [Woman] Hi, I would be interested in learning
how you think you can make it thinner,
'cause it seems like these were using like
off the shelf components that you slotted together?
- Yup.
This is a funny story.
So I was actually in China in Shenzhen,
and I was trying to buy iPhone parts
to make this out of an iPhone,
minus the case and everything.
Which is fine, if you know how to speak Chinese,
but they wouldn't sell me any parts that I wanted to make.
So I would ideally basically take the existing parts,
remove all the cases, and just reprint
a lot of the stuff that already exists today.