Social TV 2 allows users to see which television shows other people are watching and send lightweight messages from within the TV viewing experience. This information can be viewed from an on<screen buddy list. The deployed system has two presence states: “watching TV” and “away”. Users can change to the same program that their buddy is watching from the buddy list. Additionally, whenever the channel is changed, a list of buddies who are also watching that program is displayed as part of the transient channel information banner. Additionally, there is a primary ambient display, Ambient Orb, that is a color changing lamp from Ambient Devices 2 and configured it to display the current number of buddies watching television. Different colors are used to indicate whether one (blue), more than one (purple), or no other buddies (yellow) are currently watching TV. The orb is connected via serial cable to the prototype, and therefore has to be placed close to the TV. The Chumby3 is a WiFi enabled internet appliance with a 3.5’ LCD color display which provides faster updates and more reliable wireless reception than the orb’s pager based network alternative.
Source: Harboe, G., Metcalf, C. J., Bentley, F., Tullio, J., Massey, N., and Romano, G. 2008. Ambient social tv. In Proceeding of the 26th Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’08). ACM Press, 1–10.
http://web.mit.edu/bentley/www/portfolio/ac.html
