Browsing by Author "Birnholtz, Jeremy"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • No Thumbnail Available
    ItemMetadata only
    Awareness beyond the desktop: exploring attention and distraction with a projected peripheral-vision display
    (Canadian Information Processing Society, 2010) Birnholtz, Jeremy; Reynolds, Lindsay; Luxenberg, Eli; Gutwin, Carl; Mustafa, Maryam
    The initiation of interaction in face-to-face settings is often a gradual negotiation process that takes place in a rich context of awareness and social signals. This gradual approach to interaction is missing from most online messaging systems, however, and users often have no idea when others are paying attention to them or when they are about to be interrupted. One reason for this limitation is that few systems have considered the role of peripheral perception in attracting and directing interpersonal attention in face-to-face interaction. We believed that a display exploiting people's peripheral vision could capitalize on natural human attention-management behavior. To test the value of this technique, we compared a peripheral-vision awareness display with an on-screen IM-style system. We expected that people would notice more information from the larger peripheral display, which they did. Moreover, they did so while attending less often to the peripheral display. Our study suggests that peripheral-vision awareness displays may be able to improve attention and awareness management for distributed groups.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    ItemMetadata only
    Comparing awareness and distraction between desktop and peripheral-vision displays
    (ACM, 2010) Reynolds, Lindsay; Birnholtz, Jeremy; Luxenberg, Eli; Gutwin, Carl; Mustafa, Maryam
    We tested a peripheral-vision display to provide users with awareness of others and their level of interest in interaction in an experiment where participants had to be aware of a simulated workgroup during a visually-demanding primary task. Participants gathered more information from the peripheral-vision display although they attended to it significantly less often (less than half the number of glances, and less than a third of the total time spent looking). Our results suggest that the peripheral-vision space around the user is a valuable resource for awareness and communication systems.