Blind and low-vision (BLV) people face many challenges when venturing into public environments, often wishing it were easier to get help from people nearby. Ironically, while many sighted individuals are willing to help, such interactions are infrequent. Asking for help is socially awkward for BLV people, and sighted people lack experience in helping BLV people. Through a mixed-ability research-through-design process, we explore four diverse approaches toward how assistive technology can serve as help supporters that collaborate with both BLV and sighted parties throughout the help process. These approaches span two phases: the connection phase (finding someone to help) and the collaboration phase (facilitating help after finding someone). Our findings from a 20-participant mixed-ability study reveal how help supporters can best facilitate connection, which types of information they should present during both phases, and more. We discuss design implications for future approaches to support face-to-face help.

Augmented Reality (AR) presents new opportunities for immersive storytelling. However, this immersiveness faces two main hurdles. First, AR’s immersive quality is often confined to visual elements, such as pixels on a screen. Second, crafting immersive narratives is complex and generally beyond the reach of amateurs due to the need for advanced technical skills. We introduce Jigsaw, a system that empowers beginners to both experience and craft immersive stories, blending virtual and physical elements. Jigsaw uniquely combines mobile AR with readily available Internet-of-things (IoT) devices. We conducted a qualitative study with 20 participants to assess Jigsaw’s effectiveness in both consuming and creating immersive narratives. The results were promising: participants not only successfully created their own immersive stories but also found the playback of three such stories deeply engaging. However, sensory overload emerged as a significant challenge in these experiences. We discuss design trade-offs and considerations for future endeavors in immersive storytelling involving AR and IoT.

Technology, especially the smartphone, is villainized for taking meaning and time away from in-person interactions and secluding people into “digital bubbles”. We believe this is not an intrinsic property of digital gadgets, but evidence of a lack of imagination in technology design. Leveraging augmented reality (AR) toward this end allows us to create experiences for multiple people, their pets, and their environments. In this work, we explore the design of AR technology that “piggybacks” on everyday leisure to foster co-located interactions among close ties (with other people and pets). We designed, developed, and deployed three such AR applications, and evaluated them through a 41-participant and 19-pet user study. We gained key insights about the ability of AR to spur and enrich interaction in new channels, the importance of customization, and the challenges of designing for the physical aspects of AR devices (e.g., holding smartphones). These insights guide design implications for the novel research space of co-located AR.

A central challenge of social computing research is to enable people to communicate expressively with each other remotely. Augmented reality has great promise for expressive communication since it enables communication beyond texts and photos and towards immersive experiences rendered in recipients' physical environments. Little research, however, has explored AR's potential for everyday interpersonal communication. In this work, we prototype an AR messaging system, ARwand, to understand people's behaviors and perceptions around communicating with friends via AR messaging. We present our findings under four themes observed from a user study with 24 participants, including the types of immersive messages people choose to send to each other, which factors contribute to a sense of immersiveness, and what concerns arise over this new form of messaging. We discuss important implications of our findings on the design of future immersive communication systems.

Ubiquitous computing encapsulates the idea for technology to be interwoven into the fabric of everyday life. As computing blends into everyday physical artifacts, powerful opportunities open up for social connection. Prior connected media objects span a broad spectrum of design combinations. Such diversity suggests that people have varying needs and preferences for staying connected to one another. However, since these designs have largely been studied in isolation, we do not have a holistic understanding around how people would configure and behave within a ubiquitous social ecosystem of physically-grounded artifacts. In this paper, we create a technology probe called Social Wormholes, that lets people configure their own home ecosystem of connected artifacts. Through a field study with 24 participants, we report on patterns of behaviors that emerged naturally in the context of their daily lives and shine a light on how ubiquitous computing could be leveraged for social computing.

We present Project IRL (In Real Life), a suite of five mobile apps we created to explore novel ways of supporting in-person social interactions with augmented reality. In recent years, the tone of public discourse surrounding digital technology has become increasingly critical, and technology's influence on the way people relate to each other has been blamed for making people feel "alone together," diverting their attention from truly engaging with one another when they interact in person. Motivated by this challenge, we focus on an under-explored design space: playful co-located interactions. We evaluated the apps through a deployment study that involved interviews and participant observations with 101 people. We synthesized the results into a series of design guidelines that focus on four themes: (1) device arrangement (e.g., are people sharing one phone, or does each person have their own?), (2) enablers (e.g., should the activity focus on an object, body part, or pet?), (3) affordances of modifying reality (i.e., features of the technology that enhance its potential to encourage various aspects of social interaction), and (4) co-located play (i.e., using technology to make in-person play engaging and inviting). We conclude by presenting our design guidelines for future work on embodied social AR.

In recent years, public discourse has blamed digital technologies for making people feel "alone together,'' distracting us from engaging with one another, even when we are interacting in-person. We argue that in order to design technologies that foster and augment co-located interactions, we need to first understand the context in which enjoyable co-located socialization takes place. We address this gap by surveying and interviewing over 1,000 U.S.-based participants to understand what, where, with whom, how, and why people enjoy spending time in-person. Our findings suggest that people enjoy engaging in everyday activities with individuals with whom they have strong social ties because it helps enable nonverbal cues, facilitate spontaneity, support authenticity, encourage undivided attention, and leverage the physicality of their bodies and the environment. We conclude by providing a set of recommendations for designers interested in creating co-located technologies that encourage social engagement and relationship building.

We introduce Friendscope, an instant, in-the-moment experience sharing system for lightweight commercial camera glasses. Friendscope explores a new concept called a shared camera. This concept allows a wearer to share control of their camera with a remote friend, making it possible for both people to capture photos/videos from the camera in the moment. Through a user study with 48 participants, we found that users felt connected to each other, describing the shared camera as a more intimate form of livestreaming. Moreover, even privacy-sensitive users were able to retain their sense of privacy and control with the shared camera. Friendscope's different shared camera configurations give wearers ultimate control over who they share the camera with and what photos/videos they share. We conclude with design implications for future experience sharing systems.

Digital communication is often brisk and automated. From auto-completed messages to "likes," research has shown that such lightweight interactions can affect perceptions of authenticity and closeness. On the other hand, effort in relationships can forge emotional bonds by conveying a sense of caring and is essential in building and maintaining relationships. To explore effortful communication, we designed and evaluated Auggie, an iOS app that encourages partners to create digitally handcrafted Augmented Reality (AR) experiences for each other. Auggie is centered around crafting a 3D character with photos, animated movements, drawings, and audio for someone else. We conducted a two-week-long field study with 30 participants (15 pairs), who used Auggie with their partners remotely. Our qualitative findings show that Auggie participants engaged in meaningful effort through the handcrafting process, and felt closer to their partners, although the tool may not be appropriate in all situations. We discuss design implications and future directions for systems that encourage effortful communication.

User-generated content platforms curate their vast repositories into thematic compilations that facilitate the discovery of high-quality material. Platforms that seek tight editorial control employ people to do this curation, but this process involves time-consuming routine tasks, such as sifting through thousands of videos. We introduce Sifter, a system that improves the curation process by combining automated techniques with a human-powered pipeline that browses, selects, and reaches an agreement on what videos to include in a compilation. We evaluated Sifter by creating 12 compilations from over 34,000 user-generated videos. Sifter was more than three times faster than dedicated curators, and its output was of comparable quality. We reflect on the challenges and opportunities introduced by Sifter to inform the design of content curation systems that need subjective human judgments of videos at scale.

Camera glasses enable people to capture point-of-view videos using a common accessory, hands-free. In this paper, we investigate how, when, and why people used one such product: Spectacles. We conducted 39 semi-structured interviews and surveys with 191 owners of Spectacles. We found that the form factor elicits sustained usage behaviors, and opens opportunities for new use-cases and types of content captured. We provide a usage typology, and highlight societal and individual factors that influence the classification of behaviors.

Public sharing is integral to online platforms. This includes the popular multimedia messaging application Snapchat, on which public sharing is relatively new and unexplored in prior research. In mobile-first applications, sharing contexts are dynamic. However, it is unclear how context impacts users' sharing decisions. As platforms increasingly rely on user-generated content, it is important to also broadly understand user motivations and considerations in public sharing. We explored these aspects of content sharing through a survey of 1,515 Snapchat users. Our results indicate that users primarily have intrinsic motivations for publicly sharing Snaps, such as to share an experience with the world, but also have considerations related to audience and sensitivity of content. Additionally, we found that Snaps shared publicly were contextually different from those privately shared. Our findings suggest that content sharing systems can be designed to support sharing motivations, yet also be sensitive to private contexts.

There has been a marked shift towards learning and consuming information through video. Most academic research, however, is still distributed only in text form, as researchers often have limited time, resources, and incentives to create video versions of their work. To address this gap, we propose, deploy, and evaluate a scalable, end-to-end system for crowdsourcing the creation of short, 5-minute research videos based on academic papers. Doing so requires solving complex coordination and collaborative video production problems. To assist coordination, we designed a structured workflow that enables efficient delegation of tasks, while also motivating the crowd through a collaborative learning environment. To facilitate video production, we developed an online tool with which groups can make micro-audio recordings that are automatically stitched together to create a complete talk. We tested this approach with a group of volunteers recruited from 52 countries through an open call. This distributed crowd produced over 100 video talks in 12 languages based on papers from top-tier computer science conferences. The produced talks consistently received high ratings from a diverse group of non-experts and experts, including the authors of the original papers. These results indicate that our crowdsourcing approach is a promising method for producing high-quality research talks at scale, increasing the distribution and accessibility of scientific knowledge.

Crowd workers are distributed and decentralized. While decentralization is designed to utilize independent judgment to promote high-quality results, it paradoxically undercuts behaviors and institutions that are critical to high-quality work. Reputation is one central example: crowdsourcing systems depend on reputation scores from decentralized workers and requesters, but these scores are notoriously inflated and uninformative. In this paper, we draw inspiration from historical worker guilds (e.g., in the silk trade) to design and implement crowd guilds: centralized groups of crowd workers who collectively certify each other's quality through double-blind peer assessment. A two-week field experiment compared crowd guilds to a traditional decentralized crowd work model. Crowd guilds produced reputation signals more strongly correlated with ground-truth worker quality than signals available on current crowd working platforms, and more accurate than in the traditional model.

While most existing research knowledge is distributed in the form of papers, there has been a shift towards learning and consuming information through video. Limited time and resources, however, prevent individual researchers from making their work available in this format. Crowdsourcing this task is a promising alternative, but it requires solving complex coordination and collaborative video production problems. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end solution to crowdsource the creation of research videos. To assist coordination, we designed a structured workflow that enables efficient delegation of tasks, while also providing a collaborative learning environment to the crowd for motivation. To facilitate video production, we developed an online system through which groups can make micro audio recordings that are automatically stitched together to create a complete talk. We tested this approach with a group of volunteers recruited from 24 countries through an open call. This distributed crowd produced five video talks based on the best paper winners and nominees from WWW 2016. Evaluations from the authors of the papers and outside reviewers rated the talks "very good" (giving a median score of 4 out of 5). We further applied this method to translate these talks and produce 11 additional videos in Spanish, Romanian, and Catalan. These results suggest that our crowdsourcing approach has the potential to significantly increase learning and the accessibility of the scientific knowledge.

Research experiences today are limited to a privileged few at select universities. Providing open access to research experiences would enable global upward mobility and increased diversity in the scientific workforce. How can we coordinate a crowd of diverse volunteers on open-ended research? How could a PI have enough visibility into each person's contributions to recommend them for further study? We present Crowd Research, a crowdsourcing technique that coordinates open-ended research through an iterative cycle of open contribution, synchronous collaboration, and peer assessment. To aid upward mobility and recognize contributions in publications, we introduce a decentralized credit system: participants allocate credits to each other, which a graph centrality algorithm translates into a collectively-created author order. Over 1,500 people from 62 countries have participated, 74% from institutions with low access to research. Over two years and three projects, this crowd has produced articles at top-tier Computer Science venues, and participants have gone on to leading graduate programs.

Paid crowdsourcing platforms suffer from low-quality work and unfair rejections, but paradoxically, most workers and requesters have high reputation scores. These inflated scores, which make high-quality work and workers difficult to find, stem from social pressure to avoid giving negative feedback. We introduce Boomerang, a reputation system for crowdsourcing platforms that elicits more accurate feedback by rebounding the consequences of feedback directly back onto the person who gave it. With Boomerang, requesters find that their highly-rated workers gain earliest access to their future tasks, and workers find tasks from their highly-rated requesters at the top of their task feed. Field experiments verify that Boomerang causes both workers and requesters to provide feedback that is more closely aligned with their private opinions. Inspired by a game-theoretic notion of incentive-compatibility, Boomerang opens opportunities for interaction design to incentivize honest reporting over strategic dishonesty.

To lower the threshold to participation in crowdsourcing, we present twitch crowdsourcing: crowdsourcing via quick contributions that can be completed in one or two seconds. We introduce Twitch, a mobile phone application that asks users to make a micro-contribution each time they unlock their phone. Twitch takes advantage of the common habit of turning to the mobile phone in spare moments. Twitch crowdsourcing activities span goals such as authoring a census of local human activity, rating stock photos, and extracting structured data from Wikipedia pages. We report a field deployment of Twitch where 82 users made 11,240 crowdsourcing contributions as they used their phone in the course of everyday life. The median Twitch activity took just 1.6 seconds, incurring no statistically distinguishable costs to unlock speed or cognitive load compared to a standard slide-to-unlock interface.

Crowdsourcing systems leverage short bursts of focused attention from many contributors to achieve a goal. By requiring people’s full attention, existing crowdsourcing systems fail to leverage people’s cognitive surplus in the many settings for which they may be distracted, performing or waiting to perform another task, or barely paying attention. In this paper, we study opportunities for low-effort crowdsourcing that enable people to contribute to problem solving in such settings. We discuss the design space for low-effort crowdsourcing, and through a series of prototypes, demonstrate interaction techniques, mechanisms, and emerging principles for enabling low-effort crowdsourcing.

3D displays are increasingly popular in consumer and commercial applications. Many such displays show 3D images to viewers wearing special glasses, while showing an incomprehensible double image to viewers without glasses. We demonstrate a simple method that provides those with glasses a 3D experience, while viewers without glasses see a 2D image without artifacts. In addition to separate left and right images in each frame, we add a third image, invisible to those with glasses. In the combined view seen by those without glasses, this cancels the right image, leaving only the left. If the left and right images are of equal brightness, this approach results in low contrast for viewers without glasses. Allowing differential brightness between the left and right images improves 2D contrast. We observe experimentally that: (1) viewers without glasses prefer our 3D+2DTV to a standard 3DTV, (2) viewers with glasses maintain a strong 3D percept, even when one eye is significantly darker than the other, and (3) sequential-stereo display viewers with glasses experience a depth illusion caused by the Pulfrich effect, but it is small and innocuous. Our technique is applicable to displays using either active shutter glasses or passive glasses. Our prototype uses active shutter glasses and a polarizer.