Exploring the Desire to Get in Touch through Social TV Applications

Abstract

Social TVs aim to offer people the possibility to stay in touch with family and friends, supporting intergenerational experiences of social presence and awareness. While multiple approaches exist to support the social experience of watching TV (virtually) together, many available systems have focused on classic features such as buddy lists for peripheral user visualization. In addition, research on Social TV has often treated ‘watching television’ as a generic situation instead of taking the various different genres into account. This paper presents a study that compares three peripheral visualizations of recipients at remote locations while watching TV depending on the genre. Our initial results show that peripheral awareness information can support the feeling of watching television (virtually) together. Furthermore, TV genre plays a central role and should be taken into account when developing Social TV applications for intergenerational exchange.