Users send a MMS to an e-mail address. Image attachments and body text are then extracted and sent to the Collage system in order to be displayed on a picture frame in different households. All Collage systems receive the same content in the same order. If someone manipulated content in one household, this would be reflected in all of the displays in real-time. The appearance of images and text on the touch screen is initially disassociated from each other and each placed in a pseudo-random sequence. The images and text flow down the screen, repeating a display cycle after some time. This period of repetition is dependent on the amount of content in the system. The display algorithm varies the size and speed at which content displayed according to its age. Older content appears smaller and flows down the screen at a higher rate, hence appearing as if it is shrinking away to the background over time. Content can be manipulated by users on the touch screen in the following ways: Single Image Focus, Enlarging Multiple Images, Manipulation of Flow, and Deletion.
Source: Ashkanasy, S., Benda, P., and Vetere, F. 2007. Happy coincidences in designing for social connectedness and play through opportunistic image capture. In Proceedings of the Conference on Designing for User eXperiences (DUX’07). ACM Press, 2–17.
