PhotoRouter: Destination-Centric Mobile Media Messaging …

PhotoRouter: Destination-Centric Mobile Media Messaging
                                 Shane Ahern, Simon King, Hong Qu, and Marc Davis
                    University of California at Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems
                                                   Garage Cinema Research
                                       102 South Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-4600, USA
                                                http://garage.sims.berkeley.edu
                                    {sahern, simonpk, hqu, marc}@sims.berkeley.edu

ABSTRACT                                                               not predetermined. Whereas a text message is composed for an
The number of people using cameraphones is growing by tens of          intended recipient, multimedia content usually is not. Multimedia
millions every month. Yet the majority of cameraphone users            content is often shared with multiple recipients and shared
have difficulty transferring photos off their phone and sharing        multiple times after the time of capture. Moreover, multimedia
them with others. PhotoRouter is a software application for            content can be sent through many transport protocols such as
cameraphones that makes the photo sharing process destination-         MMS, HTTP, email, or Bluetooth. PhotoRouter incorporates
centric by allowing users to focus on who the photo should go to,      these insights into the application design.
not how it needs to get there. Attempting to produce an                The design of PhotoRouter is destination-centric, meaning the
application which meets user needs better than current,                system masks the underlying transport protocols and thereby
technology-centric cameraphone photo sharing applications, we          lightens the user's mental load. Instead of having to decide to
designed PhotoRouter. In this paper we describe PhotoRouter's          send a photo by email, MMS, HTTP, or Bluetooth, PhotoRouter
user interface innovations that we will show in our technical          stores each recipient's preference of how they would like to
demonstration.                                                         receive photos. For example, a single PhotoRouter sharing action
                                                                       could enable a baby photo to be sent to Uncle Bob's email,
Categories and Subject Descriptors                                     Mom's phone via MMS, and Grandma's home via snail mail.
H5.1. [Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI)]:           Because PhotoRouter tracks the routing preferences of its users,
Multimedia Information Systems; H.4.3. [Information systems            all the sender has to do is push one button to select the recipient
and applications]: Communications Applications.                        without worrying about the delivery method.

General Terms                                                          2. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
Design, Human Factors.                                                 The PhotoRouter system consists of a client application running
                                                                       on the user's cameraphone and a server application running on a
                                                                       web application server. We built the client application using Java
Keywords                                                               2 Mobile Edition (J2ME), and the server application following the
Cameraphones, photo sharing, social software, destination-centric
                                                                       Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) specification. The J2ME client
routing, mobile user interface design.
                                                                       application can in theory run on any cameraphone handset that is
                                                                       J2ME compliant. However, we only tested it on the Nokia 7610
1. INTRODUCTION                                                        phone that we had available for our study. We ran the server
The adoption of cameraphones has taken off extraordinarily             application on a commercial Web application server, Resin. The
quickly in the last few years. In 2004 alone, 257 million              server application can in theory run on any J2EE compliant Web
cameraphones were shipped worldwide. InfoTrends/CAP                    application server.
Ventures predicts that 860 million cameraphones will be shipped
                                                                       The client application is the primary way the user interacts with
in 2009, accounting for 89% of all mobile phone handsets. While
                                                                       the PhotoRouter system. The client allows users to view photos
cameraphone hardware--resolution, storage, bandwidth, etc.--
                                                                       that other users have shared with them, capture new photos, tag,
has steadily improved, software for mobile photo management
                                                                       rate, and set access permissions for photos, and share photos with
and messaging remains cumbersome. Users have to navigate
                                                                       other users. The user may also view incoming automatic share
through numerous menus which provide poor mapping between
                                                                       requests, and view and manage currently active automatic shares.
intention, action, and outcome. PhotoRouter aims to remove these
                                                                       The server application has two primary functions: to act as the
obtuse interactions by redesigning mobile photoware from the
                                                                       router of shared photos between users, and as a Web application
ground up. The PhotoRouter prototype application introduces a
                                                                       that serves as an online photo album for PhotoRouter users and a
unified media messaging paradigm driven by hotkey shortcuts
                                                                       profile manager.
and a destination-centric usage model.
In theory, many cameraphones allow for instant photo sharing via       3. APPLICATION DESIGN
the multimedia messaging service (MMS). However, photos are
                                                                       Current photo sharing processes require the user to think about
inherently different from text messages in that their recipients are
                                                                       how--namely, which technological mechanisms and transport
 Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).                             protocols need to be used--to get photos to recipients.
 MM'05, November 6­11, 2005, Singapore.                                PhotoRouter is designed to be destination-centric rather than
 ACM 1-59593-044-2/05/0011.
technology-centric, focusing on the tasks users want to                The `#' key is an example of one of many hotkey shortcuts
accomplish and hiding the technical details of how those tasks are     provided by PhotoRouter. Since all phone handsets have similar
accomplished. Users are currently compelled to use a wide variety      keypads, containing at least the digits 0-9 and the `*' and `#'
of existing services and applications to get photos from mobile        characters, it makes sense to associate some functionality with
devices to other mobile users, personal computers, or network          these keys. While all functionality can be accessed through
photo services. Currently users must use different applications        standard menus, PhotoRouter also uses the phone's keypad to
and procedures to email, MMS, blog, or otherwise distribute            access frequently used functions.
photos.




                                                                                  Figure 2. PhotoRouter's "Photo Ticker".
   Figure 1. PhotoRouter's "speed-dial" for photo sharing.
                                                                       Another design feature is a scrolling ticker of photos currently on
PhotoRouter provides a simple unified interface to the variety of      the handset (See Figure 2). Photos are grouped into three
methods for sharing, organizing, publishing, and archiving photos      collections: Inbox, Outbox, and My Photos. Moving the joystick
captured with cameraphones. PhotoRouter further streamlines the        up and down allows a user to select which collection is displayed
photo sharing process by providing a consistent user interface that    in the photo ticker on PhotoRouter's main screen. Joystick
abstracts away the underlying transport prototcols, making all         left/right allows the user to select photos within the ticker. The
destinations appear the same to the sending user. The idea of          ticker also allows users to receive photos with little fanfare and
destination-centric routing is central to PhotoRouter. PhotoRouter     without interrupting their current actions. New photos just appear
displays all potential photo recipients and destinations--blogs,       in chronological sequence in the Inbox ticker accompanied by an
email addresses, and other PhotoRouter users--the same way in          optional audio alert. Finally, the photo ticker allows all photos
the user interface and allows users to share photos to any             (those taken by the user and those shared to the user) to be
destinations via the same methods. When a user chooses to share        browsed in a similar fashion. With our unified application and
a photo, they select the recipient's alias via the contact grid (See   user interface for photo sharing, PhotoRouter offers a far simpler
Figure 1) and don't need to think about how the photo will get to      solution than the separate applications for browsing, capturing,
that recipient. The photo is sent to the PhotoRouter server along      and receiving photos on most cameraphones.
with the recipient information, and the server handles the
destination-specific details of sending out emails, posting to a
                                                                       4. REFERENCES
blog, forwarding the photo to another user's phone, etc. Users
                                                                       [1] Van House, N. A., Davis, M., Ames, M., Finn, M., &
manage recipient profiles via a web interface, and the server uses
                                                                           Viswanathan, V. The Uses of Personal Networked Digital
this profile information to route photos via the appropriate
                                                                           Imaging: An Empirical Study of Cameraphone Photos and
method.
                                                                           Sharing. In Extended Abstracts CHI 2005 (Portland, OR,
Since all recipients (regardless of the method used to deliver the         April 2-7, 2005). ACM Press, 2005, 1853-1856.
photo) appear together in the handset user interface, the              [2] Davis, M., et. al. MMM2: Mobile Media Metadata for Media
PhotoRouter sharing process is very simple. After capturing a              Sharing. In Proc. ACM Multimedia (MM 2005) (Orchard,
photo or selecting a photo from the collection of all stored photos,       Singapore, November 6-11, 2005). ACM Press, New York,
the user simply selects one or more recipients and optionally adds         NY, 2005, Forthcoming.
a message to the photo. To further streamline the sharing process,
PhotoRouter uses a speed-dial metaphor for sharing. A user's           [3] Kindberg, T., Spasojevic, M., Fleck1, R., and Sellen, A.
most frequent share recipients are mapped to the keys on the               How and Why People Use Camera Phones, Consumer
handset's numeric keypad. A grid displaying the digits 1-9 and             Applications and Systems Laboratory, HP Laboratories
their associated recipients can be called up and displayed                 Bristol, HPL-2004-216, November 26, 2004.
superimposed over the photo by pressing the keypad's `#' key.          [4] Sarvas, R., Viikari, Mikko, Pesonen, J., and Nevanlinna, H.
From the contact grid a user can select one or more recipients             MobShare: Controlled and Immediate Sharing of Mobile
with the keypad or with the phone's joystick.                              Images. In Proc. ACM Multimedia (MM 2004) (New York,
                                                                           NY, October 10-16, 2004). ACM Press, 2004, 724-731.