Widespread sensing devices enable a world in which physical spaces become personalised in the presence of mobile users. An important example of such personalisation is the use of pervasive displays to show content that matches the requirements of proximate viewers. Despite prior work on prototype systems that use mobile devices to personalise displays, no significant attempts to trial such systems have been carried out. In this article, we report on our experiences of designing, developing and operating the world’s first comprehensive display personalisation service for mobile users. Through a set of rigorous quantitative measures and 11 potential user/stakeholder interviews, we demonstrate the success of the platform in realising display personalisation, and offer a series of reflections to inform the design of future systems.

A plethora of sensors embedded in wearable, mobile, and infrastructure devices allow us to seamlessly capture large parts of our daily activities and experiences. It is not hard to imagine that such data could be used to support human memory in the form of automatically generated memory cues, e.g., images, that help us remember past events. Such a vision of pervasive "memory-augmentation systems", however, comes with significant privacy and security implications, chief among them the threat of memory manipulation: without strong guarantees about the provenance of captured data, attackers would be able to manipulate our memories by deliberately injecting, removing, or modifying captured data. This work introduces this novel threat of human memory manipulation in memory augmentation systems. We then present a practical approach that addresses key memory manipulation threats by securing the captured memory streams. Finally we report evaluation results on a prototypical secure camera platform that we built.

Today's sensor-rich mobile and wearable devices allow us to seamlessly capture an increasing amount of our daily experiences in digital format. This process can support human memory by producing "memory cues", e.g., an image or a sound that can help trigger our memories of a past event. However, first-person captures such as those coming from wearable cameras are not always ideal for triggering remembrance. One interesting option is thus to combine our own capture streams with those coming from co-located peers, in or even infrastructure sensors (e.g., a surveillance camera) in order to create more powerful memory cues. Given the significant privacy and security concerns of a system that shares personal experience streams with co-located peers, we developed a tangible user interface (TUI) that allows users to in-situ control the capture and sharing of their experience streams through a set of five physical gestures. We report on the design of the device, as well as the results of a user study with 20 participants that evaluated its usability and efficiency in the context of a meeting capture. Our results show that our TUI outperforms a comparable smartphone application, but also uncovers user concerns regarding the need for additional control devices.

Winter sports like skiing and snowboarding are often group activities. Groups of skiers and snowboarders traditionally use paper maps or board-mounted larger-scale maps near ski lifts to aid decision making: which slope to take next, where to have lunch, or what hazards to avoid when going off-piste. To enrich those static maps with personal content (e.g., pictures, prior routes taken, or hazards encountered), we developed SkiAR - a wearable augmented reality system that allows groups of skiers and snowboarders to share such content on a printed panoramic resort map. The contribution of our work is twofold: (1) we developed a system that offers a novel way to review and share personal content in situ while on the slope using a resort map; (2) we report on the results from a qualitative analysis of two user studies to inform the design and validate the usability and perceived usefulness of our prototype.

Networked public displays can stimulate interaction between members of place-based communities, e.g., through situated snapshots - photos taken through a display attached camera. Previous work pointed the need for deploying networked public display applications in various settings in order to make the findings transferable and generalizable and recommends that findings should be connected with research from community psychology. In this paper we report a 15-week "in the wild" deployment of the Moment Machine 2.0 that allowed taking situated snapshots at a university. The application's evaluation involved in-depth interviews (n=20), survey (n=119), and log file analysis. We synthesize our findings with prior work and show how certain effects transfer across settings. We show how the application affected community interaction and sense of community as defined by McMillan and Chavis. We provide implications for design of similar experiences. Overall, our work contributes to the general knowledge of common effects produced by public displays.

There is increasing interest in using digital signage to deliver highly personalised content. However, display personalization presents a number of architectural design challenges in particular, how best to provide personalisation without unduly compromising viewers' privacy. While previous research has focused on understanding specific elements of the overall vision, our work presents details of the first significant attempt at a system that integrates future pervasive display networks and mobile devices to support display personalisation. We describe a series of usage models and design goals for display personalisation and then present Tacita, a system that supports these models and goals. Our architecture includes mobile, display and cloud-based elements and provides comprehensive personalisation features while preventing the creation of user profiles within the display infrastructure, thus helping to preserve users' privacy. An initial evaluation of our prototype implementation of the architecture is also included and demonstrates the viability of the Tacita approach.

In the age of online social networks, local communities still play an essential role in supporting social cohesion. In this paper we present a study that explores the design of "interacting places" -- networked public multimedia services that foster community awareness between local members -- in the context of a student community. In order to have interacting places "fit in" with the existing communication practices of the students, we performed and analyzed a set of semi-structured interviews with n=17 students regarding their use of email, social networking services, and instant messaging to stay in touch with others. A follow-up online survey (n=76) then explored how networked public multimedia services could complement these practices. Following a "communicative ecology" approach -- a conceptual model that represents the technical, social, and discursive contexts of communication -- we draw up guidelines to support the design of both content and channels (applications) for interacting places in student communities.

Public displays are becoming a ubiquitous resource in the urban environments due to significant price drops of large LCD panels. However, most public displays are still displaying simple advertisements in the form of slide shows or movie clips, instead of offering locally customized content that resonates with passers-by. So far, creating such customized content has been expensive. As a possible solution we present the concept and architecture for autopoiesic content, i.e., self-generative content that is automatically created by matching local context information with regular scheduled information into content that is highly localized. In this paper we report on the design, operation, and user experience of FunSquare -- an application that uses autopoiesic content to present localized "fun facts" in order to strengthen the feeling of community.