Related Works: Part 2

As mentioned in Related Works: Part 1, our team recently reviewed previous literature related to media player organization, social networking integration, recommendation integration, and gesture-based controls to help us better understand current research studies in order to inform our usability test and prototype.

Part 1 covered media player organization and social networking integration. This part 2 will finish our related works overview with recommendation integration and gesture-based controls.

photo source: http://www.cityofsound.com/

For recommendation integration, there are many types of recommendation systems, which are complex, contextual, and continuously evolving. For example, there are Amazon.com’s product recommendation, YouTube's "suggestions", StumbleUpon's recommendation, and Pandora's playlists to name a few. For the purpose of this project, we focused on recommendation integration for front-end development and social-sharing. Studies have shown that most users do not want to navigate through genre lists, sliders, and other forms designed to generate preference data; instead, they want the recommendation system to be as "one-click" as possible (Gannes et al., 2011). This desire for simplicity and efficiency is important for our aVia prototype design. Furthermore, although real-life relationships are an important part of social networking and sharing, when it comes to recommendations, research shows that knowing someone in real-life is not a strong indicator of having similar preferences when it comes to online media. Therefore, recommendation systems use clustering, which puts users together based on interests, regardless of their real-life relationship (Gannes et al., 2011).

photo source: Kroeker, 2010

For gesture-based controls, research discusses the use of “proxemics” as a way for users to communicate with media devices (e.g., digital surfaces, portable devices, information appliances) using gesture-based controls in a fun, customizable, and interactive experience. This includes consideration for five key dimensions when designing these types of proxemic systems: distance, orientation, movement, identity, and location (Greenberg et al., 2011). Furthermore, other researchers have discussed the need to explore alternative interface technologies for gesture controls. Various alternatives include putting a touchscreen on the back of devices in order to allow users to use gesture controls without interfering with their view of the screen, using sensors to adapt to pressure of touch, and exploring other types of sensors, such a “scratch input” technique (i.e., user places a device on a table or surface and scratches the area near the device in order to control certain functionalities, such as adjusting the volume of a song) (Kroeker, 2010).  These are all potential design considerations for our aVia app prototype in order to increase the fun-factor of media player interaction.

See Related Works: Part 1 for an overview of the media player organization and social networking integration literature reviews or check out our full related works report.