AuraOrb Social Notification Appliance.pdf

AuraOrb: Social Notification Appliance Abstract One of the problems with notification appliances is that they can be distracting when providing information not of immediate interest to the user. In this paper, we present AuraOrb, an ambient notification appliance that deploys progressive turn taking techniques to minimize notification disruptions. AuraOrb uses eye contact sensing to detect user interest in an initially ambient light notification. Once detected, it displays a text message with a notification heading visible from 360 degrees. Touching the orb causes the associated message to be displayed on the user’s computer screen. We performed an initial evaluation of AuraOrb’s functionality using a set of heuristics tailored to ambient displays. Results of our evaluation suggest that progressive turn taking techniques allowed AuraOrb users to access notification headings with minimal impact on their focus task. Keywords Attentive User Interfaces, Ubicomp, Ambient displays, Notification devices, Information Awareness ACM Classification Keywords H5.2. Human computer interaction: User interfaces. Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CHI 2006, April 22–27, 2006, Montréal, Québec, Canada. ACM 1-59593-298-4/06/0004. Mark Altosaar Human Media Lab Queen’s University Kingston, ON K7L 3N6 Canada altosaar@cs.queensu.ca Roel Vertegaal Human Media Lab Queen’s University Kingston, ON K7L 3N6 Canada roel@cs.queensu.ca Changuk Sohn Human Media Lab Queen’s University Kingston, ON K7L 3N6 Canada csohn@cs.queensu.ca Daniel Cheng Human Media Lab Queen’s University Kingston, ON K7L 3N6 Canada dc@cs.queensu.ca CHI 2006 ? alt.chi ? Loving Me Loving You April 22-27, 2006 ? Montréal, Québec, Canada 381 Introduction In today’s workplace, users are often distracted by incoming notifications of emails, phone calls and system status messages [5]. Although users currently have a one-to-many relationship with t