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The magic window : balancing privacy and awareness in office settings

Co-workers who are physically distributed in the same building often obtain information about others through the windows in office doors. Using the information gathered by looking through the window, they can determine whether it is a good time to initiate a conversation with the occupant. There are, however, two problems with ordinary glass windows. First, there are times when the window does not provide enough information, such as when the occupant is away. Second, there is potential to violate the occupants privacy; as a result of the privacy risk, people often cover their windows entirely. If office windows are to work efficiently as a support for collaboration, there must be a balance between awareness and privacy. In this research, I augmented the functions of a physical office window with a computer-mediated replacement called the Magic Window. The Magic Window collects video of the occupant, mediates the signal in various ways, and then presents the altered view on a screen that replaces the glass window. The Magic Window provides a better balance of awareness and privacy in office settings by allowing occupant to differentiate the amount of awareness information based on the viewer. The Magic Window system was tested in an eight-month field trial. The trial showed that the augmented window did provide a balance of privacy and awareness, and also raised a number of issues that will aid the design of future design of co-present media spaces.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:USASK/oai:usask.ca:etd-02052007-224136
Date06 February 2007
CreatorsKim, Hyun Hoi James
ContributorsZhang, W. J. (Chris), McQuillan, Ian, Makaroff, Dwight, Gutwin, Carl
PublisherUniversity of Saskatchewan
Source SetsUniversity of Saskatchewan Library
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://library.usask.ca/theses/available/etd-02052007-224136/
Rightsunrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Saskatchewan or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report.

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