Streaming Media Interfaces for Chat

Proceedings of the …, 2007

Watching video online is becoming increasingly popular, and new video streaming technologies have the potential to transform video watching from a passive, isolating experience into an active, socially engaging experience. However, the viability of an active social experience is unclear: both chatting and watching video require attention, and may interfere with one another and detract from the experience. In this paper, we empirically examine the activity of chatting while watching video online. We examine how groups of friends and strangers interact, and find that chat has a positive influence on social relationships, and people chat despite being distracted. We discuss the benefits and opportunities provided by mixing chat and video, uncover some of the attentional and social challenges inherent in this combination of media, and provide guidance for structuring the viewing experience.

2000

Instant messaging (IM) has grown rapidly to involve millions of users spanning a variety of platforms. This paper outlines two preliminary studies that examined the effects of IM notifications on ongoing desktop computer productivity tasks. Results from the studies show that the disruptiveness of IM to productivity tasks is reduced if the incoming message is highly relevant to the current task, or if messages are queued until certain key computing operations have been completed. User interface design principles for the control of messaging are proposed based on the results.

Studying virtual math teams, 2009

This is an informal discussion from my personal perspective on computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). I envision an epical opportunity for promising new media to enable interpersonal interaction with today's network technologies. While asynchronous media have often been tried in classroom settings, I have found that synchronous text chat in small workgroups can be particularly engaging in certain circumstances—although perhaps chat can often be integrated with asynchronous hypermedia to support interaction within ...

2002

Casual interaction is recognized as the backbone of everyday collaboration, where a wealth of valuable information is exchanged by people in brief and impromptu but context-rich meetings [3]. Within CSCW, many researchers strive to support casual interaction between distance-separated collaborators through specially designed groupware systems.

2002

This report introduces a hybrid asynchronous, distributed audio/video group conferencing system. One of the chief benefits of Internet communication systems is that they allow communicators to write messages when they need to, and read messages when they can. Researchers, developers, and lay citizens are increasingly familiar with one of the benefits of e-mail and online text conferencing systems: the ability to use asynchronous, store-and-forward and retrieve-ondemand technologies for communication. However, most theories of interactive technologies suggest that users would achieve more accurate interpersonal perceptions and more effective and efficient work transactions if all visual and auditory non-verbal cues were available via desktop communication systems. Synchronous multimedia communication technologies achieve this, but forego the benefits of store-andforward and retrieve-on-demand. The technological barrier has been in wedding asynchronous communication to the storage, indexing, and retrieval of sound and video.

2008

This report presents ChatVis as a 2,800 LOC tool for visualizing activities in instant messaging conversations. The tool visualizes at four different levels, starting from the conversation level down to the message level, the word level and finally the character level. The tool provides means to visualize the typing speed and rhythms of an arbitrary number of conversers. Additionally, it attempts to visualize intangible characteristic of a typed message such as hesitance (uncertainty) and emphasis. ChatVis allows for mouse as well as keyboard interactions to give the user a variety of filtering and zooming options. The system state is always saved allowing for animation through temporal aspects of the conversation. Moreover, the conversation can be persisted to XML and loaded back on demand for comparison purposes amongst different people.

31st Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference - Vol. 2 - (COMPSAC 2007), 2007

Today, we are seeing an increasing number of software applications that users want to use anywhere, anytime. Such mobile applications often deliver their user interfaces (UIs) to client devices over the World Wide Web. However, web-based UIs cannot provide the same level of usability as window-based UIs on mobile devices with their small screens and occasional network dropouts. To address this challenge, we present a UI framework that combines the usability of a full-featured UI with the flexibility of a thin presentation logic: We exchange interface specifications and events between the application logic on the server and a generic UI rendering engine on the client device using an instant messaging infrastructure. The paper gives an overview of the framework architecture and the features of the communication protocol, and discusses performance measurements obtained on a public network.

Multimedia - A Multidisciplinary Approach to Complex Issues, 2012

2005 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo

A common problem with teleconferences is awkward turn-taking-particularly 'collisions,' whereby multiple parties inadvertently speak over each other due to communication delays. We propose a model for teleconference discussions including the effects of delays, and describe tools that can improve the quality of those interactions. We describe an interface to gently provide latency awareness, and to give advanced notice of 'incoming speech' to help participants avoid collisions. This is possible when codec latencies are significant, or when a low bandwidth side channel or out-of-band signaling is available with lower latency than the primary video channel. We report on results of simulations, and of experiments carried out with transpacific meetings, that demonstrate these tools can improve the quality of teleconference discussions.