SocialSense

Have you ever been in a room full of people and wondered what their names were or where they worked? Have you ever been at a conference and wanted to know more information about the person you were talking to? Too shy to ask what you perhaps should already know? SocialSense is an application that aims to tell you more about the people who are in your local environment. SocialSense aims to let you explore the profiles of nearby people who have agreed to participate in the system. The conceptual image below shows a future application where the SocialSense functionality has been incorporated into an augmented reality system so that information can be "registered" to people in the users' visual field.

Fully effective registration of digital objects to real objects in a heads up display is still a developing technology. In the first instance we are working to make the general information available, and hope to move on in time to a full augmented reality version of the system. In our current prototype we scan for nearby Bluetooth devices as a proxy for the people in your vicinity. For each Bluetooth device, we check disCourse (a LILT-developed online collaboration system) via wireless Internet access to see if that device ID has been associated with anyone's profile. If it has, we display it to the SocialSense user through a simple interface (shown below).

In order to display the information unobtrusively, we are using heads-up displays. Our current prototype uses the iPort display which looks like this:

However we hope to use even smaller and less noticeable displays as they become available.

To allow unobtrusive navigation among the profiles of nearby people, our enabling technologies group is working on a Magic Ring interface. When complete, it will allow intuitive and subtle navigation between objects.

In order to be portable, the system runs on an Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) from Samsung which runs Windows XP. The software itself has been written in Java so that it can be run on multiple different platforms.

The current user interface is shown below. The black background is useful in optical "see through" HUDs such as the LitEye since it will be transparent. When no profile is selected the interface is mainly black, and therefore transparent, avoiding clutter in the users field of vision. The iPort is not a see through device, but is the least unobtrusive of the systems we are experimenting with, and the iPort display is mounted such that the interface appears in the lower portion of the users vision; requiring the user to gaze down to see it - thus avoiding blocking their vision when looking straight ahead.

Related Publications

Brewer R. S. & Joseph S.R.H (2008).

SocialSense: A System For Social Environment Awareness. University of Hawai‘i Department of Information and Computer Sciences Technical Report.