Moment Machine: Opportunities and Challenges of Posting Situated Snapshots onto Networked Public Displays

Abstract

Abstract. Large public displays are becoming a ubiquitous resource in the urban environment. Interconnected over the Internet these hitherto isolated "ad displays" could become a novel and powerful communication medium -networked public displays. One example for such a novel type of communication is their use as community tools. Scattered across the urban landscape and equipped with additional sensors, such as cameras, they provide the opportunity for local community members to take images of themselves and leave their "mark" in the setting, e.g., on their way to school, work, or meeting with friends. In order to understand the potential of posting situated snapshots on networked public displays in the context of place-based communities we designed and developed the Moment Machine -a networked public display application that allows one-click photo capture. In this paper we report on identified opportunities and challenges emerging from 6 user trials in the wild at 2 locations.

Capture the Moment

“…In the area of situated snapshots the work reported here is closest to UBI-Postcards [22], Ubinion [8], and our prior preliminary study [14]. UBI-Postcards [22] allows passersby to take photos using a camera attached to a display − once the photos are taken users can send the photo to an email address.…”

“…While previous studies has investigated some aspects of posting situated snapshots it has either been focused on a) stimulating civic engagement within a certain age group -young adults -and allowing them to express their opinions and views about issues in a city through photo-stories created through displays [8]; or b) on soliciting user opinions on the potential use of situated snapshot through short-term user trials [14]. Also all of the above studies were much shorter than the one reported here and did not consider long-term effects of such a medium.…”

“…As urban screens are part of public spaces where place-based (or geographical, territorial) communities [2] thrive, an interesting research agenda lies in understanding their social impact, i.e., how urban screens can stimulate community interaction -interaction between community members within the public space [4,16]. Within this space researchers and artists have investigated the use of simple video links [3,6,7,25]; text messages uploaded from mobile phones [27]; user-contributed photos from a custom created website/social network [12,26] or from an existing photo sharing website, e.g., Flickr [23] or Instagram [20]; or situated snapshots created through an on-display camera [8,14,22]. Situated snapshots via public displays are fundamentally different from any photo sharing application as they require a person to be situated in front of a display in order to take a photo in a "mirror like" fashion, and unlike other photo sharing display applications that support remote access and participation through a website/social network [12,20,23,26].…”

Mercury

“…For example, Moment Machine [17] allowed users to take photographs at a display and show the resulting images locally, at other displays, or on social networks. Agora2.0 [12] provided an interactive display application for civic engagement that allowed viewers to express their opinion on predefined topics.…”

Social networked displays

“…The WE-BAT is a web-based client-server architecture based on Java PLAY client-server framework [3] and consists of three main components: 1) hooks to online platforms -in this case Facebook and Instagram -that allow easy collection and publishing of information, 2) application server that automatically pulls information from Facebook and Instagram and stores it the local database, and 3) application client that runs in a web browser and presents content to the viewers. The early version of the Moment Machine [11] is deployed in London and Nottingham as part of the "Screens in the Wild" project [4] and it supports tethered content upload [10], i.e., content taken through the on-display camera is distributed only across the screen network. Users can change the look and feel of their snapshot by selecting different filters available on the screen (similar to the Instagram application).…”