User Generated Ambient Presence
Germán Lado Insua1,2 Mike Bennett1 Paddy Nixon1 Lorcan Coyle1
1Systems Research Group
School of Computer Science & Informatics
University College Dublin, Ireland
2National University of Distance Education, Spain
germanlado@gmail.com, {mike.bennett, paddy.nixon, lorcan.coyle}@ucd.ie
ABSTRACT
Presence is an important part of our day to day lives. Of-
ten we will have a sense of who is around us and what they
are doing by the sounds of doors closing, cupboards bang-
ing, footsteps on
oors, voices vaguely heard through walls,
etc. In digital spaces, such as GUI desktops, presence en-
hances our sense of connection with geographical separate
friends and colleagues. In this paper we report on Ambi-
ent Jewelry, which is a project exploring the intersection of
individual and user generated customization with ambient
presence displays. With this research we are seeking tech-
niques that enable people to invent, discover and nd new
forms of ambient presence visualisations.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User
Interfaces
General Terms
Presence, Ubiquitousness, HCI, Instant Messaging, Commu-
nication Patterns, Digital Presence
1. INTRODUCTION
Ambient Jewelry is a work-in-progress project that explores
the intersection of individual and user generated customiza-
tion with ambient presence. The aim is to enable the cre-
ation of more personal and richer forms of ambient presence,
with the aspiration that this will allow us to more deeply
connect with our friends and family in a non-intrusive man-
ner. Within this project we used small rounded windows
that we call Jewels, to display the User activity. An exam-
ple of this Jewels can be seen on Figure 1.
Awareness of presence is an important part of our day to day
lives. Often we will have a sense of who is around us and
what they are doing by the sounds of doors closing, cup-
Figure 1: Examples of three dierent Jewels.
boards banging, footsteps on
oors, voices vaguely heard
through walls, etc. In digital spaces, such as GUI desktops,
presence enhances our sense of connection with geographical
separate friends and colleagues. For example when you use
an Instant Messaging (IM) client you see which friends are
currently online or away, and when engaged in IM chat you
are also told whether the people in the conversation are typ-
ing. On social network sites, such as Facebook, presence has
a more explicit form. We are told what the people in our
social network did, e.g. Mark joined the Ireland network,
German and Mike are now friends.
As of yet presence representations, such as in Instant Mes-
saging clients, rarely enable us to control how our presence
is represented. We cannot decide to design colourful Jewels
rather than virtual
owers (ambient presence avatars) that
spin on our friend's desktops to show how fast we're typing.
Nor can we create the relationships between arbitrarily de-
signed presence avatars and how transforms of the avatars
encode actions.
The representation of presence tends to be specied by the
designers of the presence systems. A designer decides that
colourful squares on a desktop cube are suitable for rep-
resenting a remote friend's movement, while another de-
signer designs a presence representation where an artical
ower opening means a friend is walking into a distant room,
or
owing water represents variations in currency exchange
rates [10].
Within the project we took an open design approach. That
is we acknowledge that users may be better suited to invent-
ing presence representations to suit their needs, social status
and social connectedness. There are two dierent roles for
users to design and personalise Ambient Jewelry presence:
1. The Creator of an Ambient Jewel: They design an
Ambient Jewel to t their likes, e.g. they create the
initial graphical design of a Jewel from a family pho-

tograph (static content). Then they make the Jewel
dynamic by setting up how the graphical look of the
Jewel changes based on their actions, e.g. type fast
and Jewel blinks fast.
Once a Creator has made a new Jewel they may share
it with their friends. When a Jewel is shared with
friends it is sent to the friend's remote desktop GUIs.
When a Jewel is shown on a desktop it continues chang-
ing based on the Creators remote actions.
2. The User of Ambient Jewels: The User is the person
who receives the Jewel and who sees it visually chang-
ing on their desktop.
The design process still continues with the User be-
cause the User is able to use their friends' Jewels to
decorate their desktop. A User with more Jewels has
more options to arrange them into aesthetically and
artistically appealing patterns, shapes and clusters.
In this paper we outline our framework for and approach to
enabling Users to become designers of their ambient presence
displays. We are especially interested in understanding how
the Users of a Jewel perceive the Jewel Creators actions.
By introducing sharing of the ambient displays we are indi-
rectly forcing Users to re
ect on their meanings. Will groups
of friends converge and create the same style of Jewels, al-
most forming a shared ambient display graphical language
that is specic to their group or community? Or will cer-
tain graphical representations and Jewel transforms emerge
across all Users, because they make "sense" in an ambient
display?
We are aware of the possible disturbing eects that could be
created by people (especially by blinking and other distract-
ing eects). The base eects are smooth and slow, but Users
are allowed to alter and speed them up using modiers. We
consider interesting what the outcome of these broader lim-
its may be. Will users tend to create disturbing eects? Or
will they socially agree not to use them?
With this research we are seeking techniques that enable
people to invent, discover and nd new forms of ambient
presence visualisations.
2. BACKGROUND
Presence and Ambient Displays have been explored in many
innovative research projects [2, 11, 8]. For example Info-
Canvas is an implementation of a user customizable ambient
display where users can design the contents of the ambient
display as part of information art[7]. Another similar display
is Scope [9], which consists of small iconic representations
based on notications.
There are numerous dierent approaches to digital pres-
ence awareness. In Prior et al. tell us about an interface
they created based on metaphors of the real world to help
older adults understand the concept of Instant Messaging
[6]. While Kranz et al. [4] created a novel physical device
to share our on-line status.
Figure 2: Examples of two dierent Jewels changing.
BuddyBeads[3] is an example of research into creating phys-
ical Jewels that represent dierent emotions as non-verbal
messages.
Another interesting example is Ambient Furniture that con-
nects two geographically separated family tables, e.g. place
a cup on one table and a vague outline of the cup appears
on the other table [5].
Studies have shown how the design of Instant Messaging
communication software aects interpersonal relationships
[1]. From these studies we understand how technology can
be redesigned to improve human communication and con-
nectedness [11].
Based on the results of the preliminary discussions from [6]
we understand that some participants got confused by the
concept of an unrelated picture (avatar) representing them
or their fellow participants. The same issue applies to Ambi-
ent Jewelry, since each user is able to create a unique Jewel
with unique changes based on what they do and what they
want to represent. We discuss this further in Section 4.
3. AMBIENT JEWELRY OVERVIEW
Ambient Jewelry consists of a cross-platform framework that
easily lets people create and share their presence avatars.
These avatars, which we have called Jewels, consist of small
shaped windows of approximately 20-100 pixels. The Jew-
els allow the display of people's actions on their friends and
colleagues' computers. So if a friend of mine has my Jewel,
he will be able to know if I am connected, typing, or moving
the mouse about. Furthermore, he will know I am doing
such actions by watching what my Jewel does on his desk-
top. For example, I could design my Jewel to visually fade
while changing color to red in order to display that I am
really busy typing with my keyboard. There are many more
actions that can follow the scheme:
ACTION -> EFFECT
Visually fading a Jewel is like this:
Typing -> Fade-Red
Other possible actions include:
Open-Windows->Sparkling
Mouse-Movement->Rotation
Listening-Music->Blinking
3.1 INTERFACE
The main Ambient Jewelry program consists of:
Jewels (Figure 2): Shaped display windows that represent
other people's presence. They are placed on the desktop.