Weaving Social Fabric with a Home-to-Home Network Caps

Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). Position paper for the CHI 2016 workshop “Future of Human-Building Interaction” Abstract We believe that the future of human-building interaction lies in the mediation of human-human interactions. In this work we introduce a smart home application called Ghosting, which is a two-way telepresence system that synchronizes the audio and lighting state of two homes at a room level. This allows users to converse as they normally would while sharing a home, such as by talking while in the same room or by shouting across the house. Users can additionally experience in real time the casual yet intimate interactions of daily shared living, like hearing the remote occupant walking from room to room, coughing and shuffling papers just around the corner, and seeing the lights turn on and off. Due to its broad appeal, shared virtual living could lead to the widespread deployment of space synchronization infrastructure, forming a global home-to-home network. We explore the new applications and economies that could emerge from such a network, given the capabilities of the Ghosting infrastructure.