Social Radio enables an intimate group of persons to stay in touch with each other. Each user has several artifacts at home that represent a personal circle of friends. Each artifact represents one remote individual and displays awareness information about that person. The presence of a remote person is indicated using ambient light. In addition, an artifact communicates the mood of a remote user by replaying the music the person is currently listening to. When several artifacts are placed next to each other, the artifacts take turns in playing music. This guarantees that only one artifact of the group plays music at the same time.
Source: Etter, R. and Röcker, C. 2007. A tangible user interface for multi-user awareness systems. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction (TEI’07). ACM Press, 11–12.
http://richardetter.com/index.php/social-radio/
