Who’s The Fairest Of Them All: Device Mirroring For The Connected Home

In the UK alone smartphone adoption has reached 61% in 2014. In home and living-room contexts, this adoption has led to "multi-screening", meaning the concurrent use of devices such as smartphones and tablets alongside the TV. The resultant private "digital bubble" [12] of this device usage has been discussed as raising a problematic barrier to socialization and interaction, with mobile phone use in particular having significant anti-social connotations [24]. However mobile devices have evolved new capabilities for sharing their activity, most notably through screen mirroring. This paper explores how we can utilize the TV to view screen-mirrored device activity, decreasing the digital isolation of device usage. We examine the extent to which users can attend to multiple devices on one TV, the effect this and prior systems have had on existing TV viewing, and propose ways in which we can aid users to manage their viewing of device activity on the TV. Moreover, we examine new approaches toward the accessibility of device activity, investigating systems which allow users to attend to whichever device activity they wish using multi-view displays, and discuss the social and privacy implications of having "always-on" screen-mirrored devices