The Mad Hatter´s Cocktail Party: A Social Mobile Audio Space Supporting Multiple Simultaneous Conversations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mobile social audio space that dynamically detects and supports multiple simultaneous conversations within groups, adapting audio delivery to enhance natural social interactions.

Contribution

It presents a novel system that monitors participant behavior to identify conversational floors and dynamically adjusts audio, supporting more natural and flexible group conversations.

Findings

Participants preferred the dynamic audio system over static ones.

The system effectively identified conversational floors in real-time.

Users reported improved conversational awareness and engagement.

Abstract

This paper presents a mobile audio space intended for use by gelled social groups. In face-to-face interactions in such social groups, conversational floors change frequently, e.g., two participants split off to form a new conversational floor, a participant moves from one conversational floor to another, etc. To date, audio spaces have provided little support for such dynamic regroupings of participants, either requiring that the participants explicitly specify with whom they wish to talk or simply presenting all participants as though they are in a single floor. By contrast, the audio space described here monitors participant behavior to identify conversational floors as they emerge. The system dynamically modifies the audio delivered to each participant to enhance the salience of the participants with whom they are currently conversing. We report a user study of the system, focusing on conversation analytic results.