Memstone: A tangible interface for controlling capture and sharing of personal memories

Abstract

Today's sensor-rich mobile and wearable devices allow us to seamlessly capture an increasing amount of our daily experiences in digital format. This process can support human memory by producing “memory cues”, e.g., an image or a sound that can help trigger our memories of a past event. However, first-person captures such as those coming from wearable cameras are not always ideal for triggering remembrance. One interesting option is thus to combine our own capture streams with those coming from co-located peers, in or even infrastructure sensors (e.g., a surveillance camera) in order to create more powerful memory cues. Given the significant privacy and security concerns of a system that shares personal experience streams with co-located peers, we developed a tangible user interface (TUI) that allows users to in-situ control the capture and sharing of their experience streams through a set of five physical gestures. We report on the design of the device, as well as the results of a user study with 20 participants that evaluated its usability and efficiency in the context of a meeting capture. Our results show that our TUI outperforms a comparable smartphone application, but also uncovers user concerns regarding the need for additional control devices.