Tangible MissU (Mini interactive shared sound Unit) consists of a tangible ambient sound device and a shared music playlist. Users can listen to the current song, add songs to the playlist, reorder songs in the playlist, and browse the playlist history.
Additionally, they can listen to the background sounds of the remote partner’s environment. Each partner has one MissU device in their home, to share sounds in a certain area such as the bedroom.
Each partner is represented by a color. On one partner’s device moving the green slider controls the volume of his outgoing sounds and moving the blue slider controls the other partner’s incoming sounds. One partner’s own ambient sounds are captured via a microphone and shown as the luminosity of a green LED. Both partners can move the green slider to the edge of the device to restrict his outgoing sounds, thus dimming the LED. Moving it towards the center maximizes the outgoing signal. If one partner needs quiet, he can lower sounds from the remote partner’s environment by moving the blue slider to the edge of MissU. However, the blue LED still shows the absolute volume of the sounds in the other partner’s environment.
Virtual MissU is a flash application that streams ambient sounds and music from a joint music playlist. Partners navigate to the MissU URLs using a regular browser. Each partner’s sounds are represented by a colored sphere, which can be manipulated directly in the same way as the tangible sliders. Virtual MissU was designed for the home. Another variant Simulated MissU is designed for mobile situations.
Source: Lottridge, D., Masson, N., and Mackay, W. 2009. Sharing empty moments. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’09). ACM Press, 2329–2338.
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