Mediation of Control (TVX’14)

The single physical remote control, paired to a media system, is no longer necessarily the only (or indeed primary) mechanism of control, with new input modalities (e.g. gesture) and mechanisms (e.g. mobile devices) allowing anyone to contribute to the input and control. This paper investigates the potential for extending single-user interfaces in order to support multi-user use, as a means of utilizing new inputs without having to abandon the familiar interfaces, control management behaviours and mental models that users have established. A survey was conducted investigating existing behaviours for managing control in terms of prevalence and acceptability. These behaviours and potential new ones were then incorporated into a multi-user system where management of control was virtualized, using mobile devices for input. 

We found that behaviours derived from existing ones (e.g. passing/taking control) were at worst functionally equivalent to, and in some cases superior to, managing a single physical remote control. We suggest that sharing single-user TV systems implementing these behaviours offers a viable alternative to concurrent use TV systems.

Related papers:

• M. McGill, J. Williamson, and S. A. Brewster, “How to lose friends & alienate people,” in Proceedings of the 2014 acm international conference on interactive experiences for tv and online video – tvx ’14, New York, New York, USA, 2014, p. 147–154.
  [Bibtex]

  @inproceedings{McGill2014a,
  address = {New York, New York, USA},
  author = {McGill, Mark and Williamson, John and Brewster, Stephen A.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2014 ACM international conference on Interactive experiences for TV and online video - TVX '14},
  doi = {10.1145/2602299.2602318},
  file = {:C$\backslash$:/Users/Mark/AppData/Local/Mendeley Ltd./Mendeley Desktop/Downloaded/McGill, Williamson, Brewster - 2014 - How to lose friends {\&} alienate people.pdf:pdf},
  isbn = {9781450328388},
  keywords = {media systems,mediation of control,multi-user,shared control,single-user},
  month = {jun},
  pages = {147--154},
  publisher = {ACM Press},
  title = {{How to lose friends {\&} alienate people}},
  url = {http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2602299.2602318},
  year = {2014}
  }