Spatial and Temporal Audience Behavior of Scrum Practitioners Around Semi-Public Ambient Displays

Abstract

Exploring spatial and temporal audience behavior around ambient displays is an important area of HCI research. It aids in, for instance, understanding better user appropriation in natural environments. However, there are only a few tools to capture said behavior, and simultaneously, little knowledge of the space around ambient display installations exists. In this research, we report on audience behavior observed during an in-the-wild study where we deployed our custom Ambient Surfaces solution in a professional, large-scale agile software development context for circa 5 years. Across 18 weeks in 2017, we collected skeletal data with two Microsoft Kinect v2 cameras resulting in behavior information of more than 30,000 passersby. Our results indicate, among others, that users did show the highest levels of engagement at quite some distance to the Ambient Surfaces and that people engaging in direct interaction did so rather purposely. Ultimately, this article encapsulates our research’s originality in four contributions including an approach to separate passersby from real users and an in-depth exploration of skeletal data. With the tools and methods illustrated, we hope to demonstrate manifold insights for future research on audience behavior tracking.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the company and the ASD department for their long-standing participation in this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/

2 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/wpf/

3 https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/kinect/

Additional information

Funding

This research is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—project number 451069094.

Notes on contributors

Jan Schwarzer

Jan Schwarzer is a postdoc researcher at CSTI. His primary research interests include ambient displays, machine learning, methodology development, field deployment research, and agile software development. He received his PhD in computer science from UWS.

Susanne Draheim

Susanne Draheim is managing director of the research and transfer institute Smart Systems and the affiliated research laboratories CSTI and Living Place Hamburg. She has a background in Sociology, Educational Sciences, and Cultural Sciences and holds a PhD in Sociology from TU Dresden.

Kai von Luck

Kai von Luck is a full professor at HAW Hamburg for computer science and artificial intelligence. He acts as academic director of the research and transfer institute Smart Systems and the affiliated research laboratories CSTI and Living Place Hamburg.