As an interdisciplinary group of developers, researchers, and designers, we are currently exploring collaborative co-located applications that invite users to engage with interactive audiovisual media using the mobile devices they carry with them. This work simultaneously investigates basic concepts of collaborative interactions and user experience, together with technical concepts and features. Allowing for rapid prototyping, easy deployment, and spontaneous participation, these explorations are entirely based on established and upcoming web standards such as WebSockets, WebGL, and Web Audio API. After an overview of basic concepts common to these applications, this paper describes Collective Loops, a prototypical interactive audiovisual installation that instantiates these concepts and allows for discussing important details in the design and implementation of applications of its kind. The final part of the article summarizes the incremental design and validation of two versions of the Collective Loops installation presented at public events.

We present the Collective Sound Checks, an exploration of user scenarios based on mobile web applications featuring motion-controlled sound that enable groups of people to engage in spontaneous collaborative sound and music performances. These new forms of musical expression strongly shift the focus of design from human-computer interactions towards the emergence of computer mediated interactions between players based on sonic and social affordances of ubiquitous technologies. At this early stage, our work focuses on experimenting with different user scenarios while observing the relationships between different interactions and affordances.

We introduce flash teams, a framework for dynamically assembling and managing paid experts from the crowd. Flash teams advance a vision of expert crowd work that accomplishes complex, interdependent goals such as engineering and design. These teams consist of sequences of linked modular tasks and handoffs that can be computationally managed. Interactive systems reason about and manipulate these teams' structures: for example, flash teams can be recombined to form larger organizations and authored automatically in response to a user's request. Flash teams can also hire more people elastically in reaction to task needs, and pipeline intermediate output to accelerate completion times. To enable flash teams, we present Foundry, an end-user authoring platform and runtime manager. Foundry allows users to author modular tasks, then manages teams through handoffs of intermediate work. We demonstrate that Foundry and flash teams enable crowdsourcing of a broad class of goals including design prototyping, course development, and film animation, in half the work time of traditional self-managed teams.