Novel Interaction Concepts for Event Participation Through Social Television

The present thesis is concerned with Human-Computer Interaction in the context of what we call “social television”: the recent embracement of television systems, internet technologies, and social services. The ultimate research goal of this thesis is the development of novel, appropriate interaction concepts to support social television users – located either in situ (mobile in the field) or at-home – dealing with both user-generated or authoritative (professional) contents. To develop concrete interaction concepts and to empirically validate their suitability, the present thesis puts a narrow focus on the event participation where spectators share the very same location and happening. Event participation is certainly a great way for many to get involved in a fun activity and to form a community. The so-called local-scope mass events – such as stadium -based sporting events – attract a large number of spectators to witness and experience the live atmosphere of something extraordinary in-situ. Moreover, the availability of a variety of event-related multimedia content – such as professional broadcasts and user-generated content – enables an even larger number of TV viewers to follow live happenings remotely at homes. Beside all inherent advantages that each type of the event participation offers, they suffer from several limitations. The monotony of a single (and thus restricted) viewing perspective, particularly in all-seater event venues, may potentially result in missing important moments, scenes and sub-events that occur out of the view of or far away from spectators. As another consequence of being physically restricted to a particular seat, social interaction of spectators is limited to nearby people. On the other hand, TV viewers following the event remotely require more immediate and less distracting interaction modalities at homes. Moreover, they may feel socially disconnected as there is less proper and immediate way to share their excitement, opinion, and support for their team which may mar event experiences. The present thesis aims at reducing these deficiencies by leveraging late technology trends, in particular mobile video sharing and body-centric sensing approaches. The contributions of the present thesis are placed alongside three main research directions. The first, in-situ experiences, explores how mobile user-generated content (particularly video) sharing in real-time can support the coconstruction of experiences during local-scope mass events. It particularly focuses on investigating the design requirements and guidelines for mobile systems supporting both multicamera viewing perspective and social interactions in-situ. Based on an iterative design process, it further contributes a set of novel interaction techniques for user-generated livevideo sharing which are then evaluated in two field studies. The results indicatethat the novel digital experience with live video on mobile devices enhances the overall event experiences in-situ. The second research direction, at-home experiences, looks at how viewers can interact with televisions in a less-distracting way, particularly while watching a live program. It focuses on device-less and body-centric interaction that goes beyond the traditional button-based remote control paradigm. In this light, two novel bodybased TV user interfaces are proposed supporting the whole body and hand-based inputs. The findings of a set of user studies confirmed that leveraging the human body as an interface for the television has various advantages – such as being omnipresent, device-less, and eyes-free – and thus can enhance the experience of TV watching activity in living room settings. Finally, the third research direction, home-field (connected) experiences, addresses how the gap between people participating the event in the field and following it from home can be bridged. The social patterns and preferences of TV viewers for watching – not only live coverage of mass events but also other main TV genres – with non-collocated people are initially examined. The analysis leads to a set of requirements that served as rationale for the design of interaction techniques to connect sport fans in both realms. This is achieved through sharing mobile live video sharing as well as implicit gestural information of viewers in front of the TV. An early user feedback evaluation reveals a great potential for mutually contributing to the event engagement, potentially leading to more immersive and socially connected experiences during live sporting events