Beyond show of hands: Engaging viewers via expressive and scalable visual communication in live streaming

Abstract

Live streaming is gaining popularity across diverse application domains in recent years. A core part of the experience is streamerviewer interaction, which has been mainly text-based. Recent systems explored extending viewer interaction to include visual elements with richer expression and increased engagement. However, understanding expressive visual inputs becomes challenging with many viewers, primarily due to the relative lack of structure in visual input. On the other hand, adding rigid structures can limit viewer interactions to narrow use cases or decrease the expressiveness of viewer inputs. To facilitate the sensemaking of many visual inputs while retaining the expressiveness or versatility of viewer interactions, we introduce a visual input management framework (VIMF) and a system, VisPoll, that help streamers specify aggregate, and visualize many visual inputs. A pilot evaluation indicated that VisPoll can expand the types of viewer interactions. Our framework provides insights for designing scalable and expressive visual communication for live streaming.