A Time to Glance: Studying the Use of Mobile Ambient Information

Recent work by our group at Motorola Labs has focused on applying the principles of ambient interfaces to the domain of mobile communications. Our methods incorporate both formative ethnographic studies and field evaluation of prototypes to investigate how people make use of ambient information in the course of everyday communication. Our goal is to enable applications that provide rich presence information for close friends and family that is appropriate to their particular tasks and social conventions. In this paper, we briefly summarize the results of two prior field studies of ambient awareness on mobile phones: shared motion presence and music listening history. We then discuss our current efforts in context-aware photo sharing on the phone. Together, these studies provide insights about how people understand, use, and contextualize presence information. We also show how this information helps people stay connected and strengthens relationships. We hope to use these insights to establish how contextual information can be gathered, synthesized and displayed to more effectively promote connectedness.