This is my review. Comments are appreciated...
Engaging with a Situated Display via Picture Messaging
This paper [Martin et al., 2006] describes and early investigation in the use of text and picture messaging as an interaction mechanism for situated displays.
The system was called Joe Blogg and was "designed to be interacted with at moments of 'pause'." It basically consisted of a projection which displayed text and pictures sent by people. The system was installed in a reception area of the Bartlett School of Architecture since it was an area of great movement and so propitious to be seen and interacted with by a lot of people.
This prototype was installed for two days during which the authors were present near the projection and would talk to people to motivated them to interact and explain the project.
The results from those two days were "disappointing" for the authors: the total number of messages sent was 8 MMS and 8 SMS. Since the time period was very short it is not clear if there would be an increase in the interactions as people became more familiar with it, but the author expected it to increase.
The authors point out some barriers to the engagement of people with the system: the fear/embarrassment of doing something wrong and the complicated procedures to configure picture messaging in the mobile phone (this was considered the greater barrier).
Some of the analysis presented is dubious: the authors say that, unexpectedly, no one (participants nor observers) mentioned the cost of sending MMS and SMS as a barrier to interaction but (according to their description of the evaluation procedure) they don't say if they were explicitly asked to comment on the cost of sending an SMS or MMS. Especially the observers might not consider it important to mention just because they simply did not use it or just.
The fact that people did not have to be co-located with the projection to use it (since they could text or picture message from anywhere once they knew the phone number) was considered beneficial. However this might have an impact on the whether the system could be considered a 'situated display' or not, but this was not studied.
The main conclusion was that the location of the system and the motivation for people to interact with it are fundamental.
[Martin et al., 2006]
Martin, K., Penn, A., and Gavin, L. (2006). Engaging with a situated display via picture messaging. In CHI '06: CHI '06 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, pages 1079-1084, New York, NY, USA. ACM.
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