Matthew Yapchaian | Pixhale
current information
Fall 2004
Karrie requires all members of Social Spaces to submit papers to conferences, Pixhale was my first attempt (CHI 2006) and rejected as a work in progress. I received invaluable criticism from four reviewers and hope to continue developing Pixhale.
Download paper here.
Pixhale
Pixhale was an initial response to several questions: How can two people separated by geographical distance have an intimate experience through a mobile device? How can a mass produced mechanical object (mobile device) possess more organic attributes? How can a synchronous interactive experience continue as asynchronous?
User A contacts user B with a text message request to participate in a Pixhale exchange. If B responds to the message in the affirmative, both phones will be enabled for a Pixhale exchange. Users A and B each select an image from his/her image library. Once an image is selected it will be present on their partner”Ēs phone with a zero opacity value. User A”Ēs selected image (from A”Ēs library) will appear on the screen of user B”Ēs mobile device.
When both images have been exchanged, an audio and visual alert will cue the users to begin breathing. As the users begin to breathe the will only see the image sent to them from their partner. Images will stay active on each user”Ēs phone for the duration of the Pixhale session or until image opacity is 100%. If the session is prematurely terminated, before opacity is equal to 100%, only the local images are retained.
The opacity of the images are increased when a user breathes on the phone. Each breath value (measuring volume) is distributed to both devices. Pixhale allows each user to contribute a maximum of 50% opacity value, allowing an image exchange only through collaborative synchronous interaction between two users.
When users A and B begin to breathe into their phones the images' opacity increases synchronously and proportionally to reveal the exchanged images. Users A and B have the option to immediately increase the opacity to 100% or play with their partner through a pushing and pulling of the opacity value, extending the temporality of their interaction. When image opacity reaches 100% an audio and visual alert will cue each user of the conclusion to their Pixhale interaction. Each user will have the option to retain the exchanged image in their image library.
Pixhale continues beyond the described interaction as users begin to collect images throughout their day as possible Pixhale content.
Prototype
The current version of Pixhale was my first experience designing and prototyping a project for Social Spaces.
Pixhale is currently a web-based prototype supporting social computer mediated communicates between two networked desktop/laptop computers. Pixhale's current implementation exchanges two static images (jpegs).
Future Prototyping
Developing the current version of Pixhale (static images) will move from a web-based interface to a Linux-based PDA. Currently the image exchange is designed to store the exchanged image in the useer's local library, future iterations of Pixhale will explore the mobile interace as a possible site for the interaction, viewing, and storage of an image.
I am interested in furthering the experimentation with video files.