1 SocialSense: A System For Social Environment Awareness Robert S. Brewer, Samuel R. H. Joseph, Guanghong Yang, Neil Scott, Daniel Suthers University of Hawaii Ubiquitous Wireless Applications Group Laboratory for Interactive Learning Technologies Department of Information and Computer Sciences 1680 East West Road, POST 309 Honolulu, HI 96822, USA rbrewer@lava.net ABSTRACT SocialSense is a system designed to provide additional social information about nearby people. SocialSense detects Bluetooth devices and uses them to infer the presence of particular people, pulling their profiles and status from online social networking sites. SocialSense differs from existing mobile social awareness systems by integrating live feeds from multiple sources. Information is shown to the user via a head-mounted display, and the user controls the system using buttons mounted on a ring input device or “Magic Ring”. The aim is a system that can be used unobtrusively, allowing users to go about face-to-face interactions in a normal manner. Author Keywords social networking, wearable computer, presence sharing. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.3 [Information Interfaces And Presentation (e.g., HCI)]: Group and Organization Interfaces — Collaborative computing INTRODUCTION As people go about their lives, they pass through spaces filled with other people. They will interact with some of these people, but most will be passed by without interaction. One barrier to interaction is unfamiliarity: people are less likely to talk to a stranger they don’t know anything about. There is also forgetfulness, such as remembering someone’s face but forgetting their name, organizational affiliation, and interests. This paper describes a system called SocialSense that allows users to be more aware of the social background of people in the environments they inhabit. SocialSense allows the user to explore the profiles and status information of nearby people who have agreed to participate in the system. Profiles are retrieved from an online community site, while status comes from the Twitter microblogging service [14]. Twitter status information consists of a message of up to 140 characters, similar to mobile SMS messages, and provides a potentially dynamic snapshot of a person’s current thoughts or activities. The current prototype scans for nearby Bluetooth devices as a proxy for the people in the user’s vicinity. The profiles are shown to the user via a head-mounted display (HMD), and the user controls the system using buttons mounted on a ring input device or “Magic Ring”. We see the combination of technologies in SocialSense as particularly important. The HMD allows us to display profile icons in the user’s peripheral vision to be attended to or ignored based on the user’s wishes, as in the eye-q system [3]. The Magic Ring is a deliberately simple input device, designed to allow users to navigate the user interface as easily as possible. While the current SocialSense prototype is quite bulky, we aim to develop a system that can be used unobtrusively, which is important for a system designed to aid social interactions. For example, a SocialSense user could be walking through a University courtyard filled with people on their way to lunch. As the user is walking, a thumbnail picture of a colleague appears at the edge of their field of view, indicating that the person is nearby. Without this notification, the user might not have noticed the presence of the colleague. Picking them out of the crowd, the user approaches the colleague and asks if they are free for lunch. As they walk to lunch, the user can see their colleague’s most recent Twitter status update regarding a paper submission to an upcoming conference. The user is also going to that conference, potentially providing a fertile topic for lunchtime conversation. RELATED WORK SocialSense brings together research on location-based social networking systems and alternative input devices. Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). UbiComp '08 Workshop W1 -- Devices that Alter Perception (DAP 2008) September 21st, 2008 This position paper is not an official publication of UbiComp '08.