devices for sharing thoughts and affection at a distance

with Heather Richter, Khai Truong, David Nguyen, and Gregory Abowd

Interpersonal communication involves more than just words. Many forms of communication involve physical acts showing warm thoughts and affection, such as giving flowers or displaying photos. Yet these forms of personal communication are difficult at a distance. In this paper, we describe the concept of devices for communicating affection and thoughts from a distance. We designed and built two devices that we are exploring to support many of these physical interpersonal interactions - an augmented candy dispenser and a digital picture frame.

publications:

Truong, K.N., Richter, H., Hayes, G.R., Abowd, G.D. Devices for Sharing Thoughts and Affection at a Distance. In the Extended Abstracts of ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems: CHI 2004: (April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria), 2004.