Talking in circles: designing a spatially-grounded audioconferencing environment

  • Authors:
  • Roy Rodenstein;Judith S. Donath

  • Affiliations:
  • Sociable Media Group, MIT Media Lab, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA;Sociable Media Group, MIT Media Lab, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2000

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.01

Visualization

Abstract

This paper presents Talking in Circles, a multimodal audioconferencing environment whose novel design emphasizes spatial grounding with the aim of supporting naturalistic group interaction behaviors. Participants communicate primarily by speech and are represented as colored circles in a two-dimensional space. Behaviors such as subgroup conversations and social navigation are supported through circle mobility as mediated by the environment and the crowd and distance-based attenuation of the audio. The circles serve as platforms for the display of identity, presence and activity: graphics are synchronized to participants' speech to aid in speech-source identification and participants can sketch in their circle, allowing a pictorial and gestural channel to complement the audio. We note user experiences through informal studies as well as design challenges we have faced in the creation of a rich environment for computer-mediated communication.