The Haunted House: Networking Smart Homes to Enable Casual Long-Distance Social Interactions
Meghan Clark, Prabal Dutta

Citation
Meghan Clark, Prabal Dutta. "The Haunted House: Networking Smart Homes to Enable Casual Long-Distance Social Interactions". The 2015 International Workshop on Internet of Things towards Applications (IoT-App'15), 1, November, 2015.

Abstract
Despite the dominance of social networking and communications in nearly every aspect of our digital lives, little work has been done to examine the unique contributions that networked smart homes can make in the space of technologically-mediated human interaction. In this work, we introduce an application called "ghosting" that turns a smart and connected home into a socially-connected home. We show that unlike direct teleconferencing, the Internet of Things supports more subtle, ambient, and incidental exchanges that can make an environment feel co-inhabited by a person who may be many miles away.

Ghosting synchronizes audio and lighting between two homes on a room-by-room basis. Microphones in each room transmit audio to the corresponding room in the other home, unifying the ambient sound domains of the two homes. For example, a user cooking in their kitchen transmits sounds out of speakers in the other user's own kitchen. The lighting context in corresponding rooms is also synchronized. A light toggled in one house toggles the lights in the other house in real time. We claim that this system allows for casual interactions that feel natural and intimate because they share context and require less social effort than a teleconference or phone call. We describe the design points of the system and explore the successes and limitations of the ghosting user experience by implementing and deploying a ghosting application in two different settings.

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Citation formats

• HTML

  Meghan Clark, Prabal Dutta. <a
  href="http://www.terraswarm.org/pubs/617.html"
  >The Haunted House: Networking Smart Homes to Enable
  Casual Long-Distance Social Interactions</a>, The 2015
  International Workshop on Internet of Things towards
  Applications (IoT-App'15), 1, November, 2015.

• Plain text

  Meghan Clark, Prabal Dutta. "The Haunted House:
  Networking Smart Homes to Enable Casual Long-Distance Social
  Interactions". The 2015 International Workshop on
  Internet of Things towards Applications (IoT-App'15), 1,
  November, 2015.

• BibTeX

  @inproceedings{ClarkDutta15_HauntedHouseNetworkingSmartHomesToEnableCasualLongDistance,
      author = {Meghan Clark and Prabal Dutta},
      title = {The Haunted House: Networking Smart Homes to
                Enable Casual Long-Distance Social Interactions},
      booktitle = {The 2015 International Workshop on Internet of
                Things towards Applications (IoT-App'15)},
      day = {1},
      month = {November},
      year = {2015},
      abstract = {Despite the dominance of social networking and
                communications in nearly every aspect of our
                digital lives, little work has been done to
                examine the unique contributions that networked
                smart homes can make in the space of
                technologically-mediated human interaction. In
                this work, we introduce an application called
                "ghosting" that turns a smart and connected home
                into a socially-connected home. We show that
                unlike direct teleconferencing, the Internet of
                Things supports more subtle, ambient, and
                incidental exchanges that can make an environment
                feel co-inhabited by a person who may be many
                miles away. <p>Ghosting synchronizes audio and
                lighting between two homes on a room-by-room
                basis. Microphones in each room transmit audio to
                the corresponding room in the other home, unifying
                the ambient sound domains of the two homes. For
                example, a user cooking in their kitchen transmits
                sounds out of speakers in the other user's own
                kitchen. The lighting context in corresponding
                rooms is also synchronized. A light toggled in one
                house toggles the lights in the other house in
                real time. We claim that this system allows for
                casual interactions that feel natural and intimate
                because they share context and require less social
                effort than a teleconference or phone call. We
                describe the design points of the system and
                explore the successes and limitations of the
                ghosting user experience by implementing and
                deploying a ghosting application in two different
                settings.},
      URL = {http://terraswarm.org/pubs/617.html}
  }
  

Posted by Christopher Brooks on 21 Sep 2015.