Defining sociability and social presence in Social TV

Social TV, a new interactive television service, has been rapidly developing. With the conceptual model of sociability, this study empirically investigates the effects of perceived sociability on the motivations and attitudes toward Social TV. A model is created to validate the relationship of perceived sociality to social presence, usability, and intention. Empirical findings show the key influence of sociability on users’ acceptance and intent to continue using Social TV. Implications of the findings are discussed in terms of building a theory of sociability and providing practical insights into developing a meaningful sociable TV interface.     

Emotion recognition from physiological signals using wireless sensors for presence technologies

In this article we describe a new approach to enhance presence technologies. First, we discuss the strong relationship between cognitive processes and emotions and how human physiology is uniquely affected when experiencing each emotion. Secondly, we introduce our prototype multimodal affective user interface. In the remainder of the paper we describe the emotion elicitation experiment we designed and conducted and the algorithms we implemented to analyse the physiological signals associated with emotions. These algorithms can then be used to recognise the affective states of users from physiological data collected via non-invasive technologies. The affective intelligent user interfaces we plan to create will adapt to user affect dynamically in the current context, thus providing enhanced social presence.     

Investigating factors affecting social presence and user satisfaction with Mobile Instant Messaging

The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that influence social presence and user satisfaction with Mobile Instant Messaging (mIM). The proposed research model integrates channel expansion, social influence, social presence and media richness theories, to explain how user experience, social influence, and medium richness influence social presence and user satisfaction with mIM. A total of 239 students from a state university in the US participated in this study. Data was collected via a web-based survey. The results suggest that user experience, social influence, and perceived richness are important drivers for social presence and user satisfaction in mIM. The implications of the study findings are discussed in the paper.     

Increasing social presence of social actors in e-learning environments: Effects of dynamic and static emoticons on children

The present research aimed to employ dynamic and static emotions as social cues in e-learning environments for computers to be able to convey social presence and increase children’s motivation with learning. To understand how children of different gender react to the two types of emoticon in e-learning environment, a math problem-solving practice program was designed to test their reactions. The program features two treatments, dynamic emoticons and static emoticons. A 2 × 2 (emoticon style × gender) between-subjects factorial design was adopted for this study. One hundred seventy-three sixth graders participated in this study. Data were collected via questionnaire regarding the perceived social presence and children’s intrinsic motivation, and then analyzed by means of two-way ANOVA. The results show that the children in dynamic-emoticon condition perceived a higher degree of social presence and reported greater intrinsic motivation than those in static-emoticon condition. The feelings of social presence created by the computer itself can mediate children’s intrinsic motivation. Besides, no gender differences in children’s attitudes toward computers were observed. It suggests that the use of dynamic emoticons as social cues incorporating in e-learning environments can enable children to perceive computers on social dimension and lead to increase their motivation with learning.     

Presence: a unique characteristic in educational virtual environments

This article investigates the effect of presence on learning outcomes in educational virtual environments (EVEs) in a sample of 60 pupils aged between 11 and 13 years. We study the effect of personal presence, social presence and participant’s involvement on certain learning outcomes. We also investigate if the combination of the participant’s representation model in the virtual environment (VE) with the way it is presented gives a higher sense of presence that contributes to learning outcomes. Our results show that the existence of an avatar as the pupils’ representation enhanced presence and helped them to successfully perform their learning tasks. The pupils had a high sense of presence for both cases of the EVE presentation, projection on a wall and through a head mounted display (HMD). Our socialized virtual environment seems to play an important role in learning outcomes. The pupils had a higher sense of presence and completed their learning tasks more easily and successfully in the case of their egocentric representation model using the HMD.     

A design-and-play approach to accessible user interface development in Ambient Intelligence environments

User interface development in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environments is anticipated to be a particularly complex and programming intensive endeavor. Additionally, AmI environments should ensure accessibility and usability of interactive technologies by users with different characteristics and requirements in a mainstream fashion. Therefore, appropriate user interface development methods and tools are required, capable of both reducing development efforts and ‘injecting’ accessibility issues into AmI applications from the early design stages. This paper introduces two tools, named AmIDesigner and AmIPlayer, which have been specifically developed to address the above challenges through automatic generation of accessible Graphical User Interfaces in AmI environments. The combination of these two tools offers a simple and rapid design-and-play approach, and the running user interfaces produced integrate non-visual feedback and a scanning mechanism to support accessibility. AmIDesigner and AmIPlayer have been evaluated to assess their usability by designers, and have been put to practice in the redevelopment of a light control application in a smart environment as a case study demonstrating the viability of the design-and-play approach. The results confirm the usefulness and usability of the tools themselves. Overall, the proposed approach has the potential to contribute significantly to the development, up-take and user acceptance of AmI technologies in the home environment.     

Designing for privacy and self-presentation in social awareness

Social awareness applications are based on the idea of a group sharing real-time context information via personal and ubiquitous terminals. Studies of such applications have shown that users are not only concerned with the preservation privacy through non-disclosure. Instead, disclosure is manipulated for the constant presentation of self to the group in everyday social situations. Basing on 3 years of research with the mobile social awareness system ContextContacts, established findings in social psychology and ubiquitous computing, we propose a number of design principles to support users in this management of privacy and presentation. These principles are to apply even if disclosure is automated, and include support for lightweight permissions, assuming reciprocity, appearing differently to different audiences, providing for feedback on presentation and allowing lying. These principles are applied in interaction design and protocol engineering for the next version of a mobile awareness system called ContextContacts.

Immersive user environments in rehabilitation robotics and mechatronics

Advances in software, computing, control architectures, and design practice have led to rehabilitation robots with high-bandwidth, bidirectional user interfaces that allow people to interact with mechatronic systems in highly realistic, cognitively and biomechanically coupled scenarios. Immersive and graphic interfaces to real-time systems such as robots require, robust control environments and high-speed computing to provide safe, human-scale motions and interfaces with sufficient quality to be usable in functional environments. This paper illustrates some emerging applications in rehabilitation, spanning assistive technology, simulation/design aids, and smart therapy devices. Examples will be drawn laregly from work done at the VA Palo Alto Rehabilitation R&D Center.     

Ambient awareness: From random noise to digital closeness in online social networks

Ambient awareness refers to the awareness social media users develop of their online network in result of being constantly exposed to social information, such as microblogging updates. Although each individual bit of information can seem like random noise, their incessant reception can amass to a coherent representation of social others. Despite its growing popularity and important implications for social media research, ambient awareness on public social media has not been studied empirically. We provide evidence for the occurrence of ambient awareness and examine key questions related to its content and functions. A diverse sample of participants reported experiencing awareness, both as a general feeling towards their network as a whole, and as knowledge of individual members of the network, whom they had not met in real life. Our results indicate that ambient awareness can develop peripherally, from fragmented information and in the relative absence of extensive one-to-one communication. We report the effects of demographics, media use, and network variables and discuss the implications of ambient awareness for relational and informational processes online.     

支持协同感知的人-人交互界面的设计

描述了有关人-人交互界面中协同感知的基本概念和支持协同感知的常用方法,并在一般远程光标的基础上,提出了自适应远程光标的概念,使之不仅可以表现成员的身份、聚焦注意力,并且能够适应不同的工作模式及对象的不同表现形式。     

Presence in the age of social networks: augmenting mediated environments with feedback on group activity

The present study aimed at increasing behavioral engagement in groups of networked people by providing feedback on the group activity. Each participant logged into an on-line virtual environment for four subsequent treasure-hunting sessions along with other nine players. During the game, all players communicated dyadically through textual chats, and searched for the treasures in the virtual environment. In two conditions, the participants received a visual feedback depicting the communication activity with the group based on social network analysis indices (i.e. ‘centrality’ or ‘reciprocity’). Feedback was not provided in the third condition. The underlying assumption was that if the group activity becomes more visible to the individual user through the feedback, then the behavioral engagement with the group increases. The resulting behavioral engagement was measured with two techniques, one based on the amount of messages exchanged and one based on self-reported measures. The results show that feedback improved the exchange of messages with respect to the control condition and that this effect was only partially captured by self-reported measures.

Access,utility, imperfection: The impact of videoconferencing on perceptions of social presence

The intent of the research study was to identify relationships between the use of videoconferencing in meetings and what perceptions of social presence may exist related to age, gender, and usage compared to face-to-face meetings. Employees from a large Midwestern University Information Technology division who utilize videoconferencing to facilitate meetings as an alternative to face-to-face meetings were surveyed to assess experiences, perceptions, and satisfaction. Female and male employees (N = 157), ranging in age from 18 to over 50 years of age, provided the frequency of usage, and responded to questions related to perceptions of social presence. Quantitative analysis of the resulting data supported the hypothesis that one of the independent variables, gender, had a positive impact on perceptions of social presence. Brief interviews further elucidated the quantitative findings. While videoconferencing seems to have drawbacks, accessibility, flexibility, and utility are important aspects that are clear from participants’ perceptions of videoconferencing.     

社会化推荐系统的研究进展综述

对社会网络环境下构建个性化推荐系统的现有技术进行综述。介绍社会网络的基本概念,简述推荐系统的应用领域和目前面临的挑战,重点介绍社会化推荐的相关技术的研究现状,包括用户生成内容、社会化标签推荐、博客挖掘和基于信任的推荐,分析社会化推荐面临的主要问题。利用Web 2．0环境下的用户生成内容,为解决用户配置和冷启动问题提供一个研究方向。     

Intragroup status and social presence in online fan groups

Low and high status member posts from online fan message board posts were examined. Low status members, as compared to high status members, were found to use more intimacy and immediacy social presence cues, including: praise for the group, self-disclosure, friendly and positive affective language, first person singular pronouns, and present tense verbs. Low status members were less likely than high status members to use articles, larger words, and discrepancy words. Lastly, low status members were rated as more likeable than high status members. The results suggest that low status members may strategically use social presence cues as a means of ingratiating themselves to the group.     

User interface—application communication in the Chimera user interface management system

Until quite recently, perhaps the least appreciated part of user interface management system (UIMS) architecture has been the interface to the application. A number of approaches to interface-application communication have been attempted, but these have suffered as a result of being non-programmable, unstructured and/or static. This paper presents the user-interface-application communication system developed for the Chimera UIMS, which attempts to address these problems. This system enables interprocess communication between user interface and application via an explicit, programmable UIMS component—an application linkage, which is structured, dynamic and reconfigurable at run-time. The internal structure of the linkage is described, along with the mechanism for communication with dialogue control and application. An extensive example is developed in order to illustrate the communication process to and from the user via dialogue control and linkage to the application.     

Social presence in relation to students' satisfaction and learning in the online environment: A meta-analysis

Social presence, the ability to perceive others in an online environment, has been shown to impact student motivation and participation, actual and perceived learning, course and instructor satisfaction, and retention in online courses; yet very few researchers have attempted to look across contexts, disciplinary areas, or measures of social presence. This meta-analysis allowed us to look across these variables of the primary studies and identify the pattern of student outcomes (e.g., perceived learning and satisfaction) in relation to social presence through scrutiny of differences between the studies. The results showed a moderately large positive average correlation between social presence and satisfaction (r = 0.56, k = 26) and social presence and perceived learning (r = 0.51, k = 26). Large variation among correlations (86.7% for satisfaction and 92.8% for perceived learning, respectively) also indicated systematic differences among these correlations due to online course settings. We found that (a) the strength of the relationship between social presence and satisfaction was moderated by the course length, discipline area, and scale used to measure social presence; and (b) the relationship between social presence and perceived learning was moderated by the course length, discipline area, and target audience of the course. Implications and future research are discussed.     

A sense of self: The role of presence in virtual environments

Several factors contribute to an individual’s experiences in computer-based environments. Previous research shows one such factor, the degree to which users feel connected to a virtual environment, influences the actions of individuals within the environment ( and ). Additional factors, such as people’s personality and the personality of their avatar, influence behaviors in virtual environments (McCreery, Krach, Schrader, & Boone, 2012). The current study focused on the role of presence as it affects behavior within the virtual environment. Presence has been defined as the psychological state where virtual experiences feel authentic. However, the degree to which presence acts as a mediating variable in virtual environments is not well understood. The current study employed a combination of survey instruments and direct observation to explore the relationships among personality of self and avatar, presence, and behaviors within a virtual environment. Findings indicated that participant scores in the domain of agreeableness were a significant predictor of agreeable behavior in the virtual environment. However, with the exception of negative effects (e.g., dizziness), presence does not appear to influence behavior. Overall implications for these findings are discussed.     

Five facets of social presence in online distance education

Social presence in online learning environments refers to the degree to which a learner feels personally connected with other students and the instructor in an online learning community. Based on a 19 item Online Social Presence Questionnaire (OSPQ) given to college students in two different online learning courses, a series of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses consistently revealed five factors representing facets of social presence in online learning environments: social respect (e.g. receiving timely responses), social sharing (e.g., sharing information or expressing beliefs), open mind (e.g., expressing agreement or receiving positive feedback), social identity (e.g., being called by name), and intimacy (e.g., sharing personal experiences). Together, the five factors accounted for 58% of the variance and were based on 19 items. Although much previous research focuses on cognitive aspects of learning in online environments, understanding the role of the learner’s sense of presence may be particularly important in distance learning situations in which students and the instructor are physically separated.