Augmenting Interpersonal Communication through Connected Lighting

• Published in: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems pp. 1924 - 1931
• Main Authors: Morris, Margaret E., Carmean, Douglas M., Minyaylov, Artem, Ceze, Luis
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 06.05.2017
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Human-centered computing; Human-centered computing > Collaborative and social computing; emotion; connected devices; communication; lighting; IoT
• DOI: 10.1145/3027063.3053141
• ISBN: 9781450346566; 1450346561

This paper describes a system, WeLight, that we developed to facilitate communication. It allows individuals to configure the lights in one another's homes as well as their own. We describe this system and its motivation from exploratory interviews with households using existing connected lighting products. To ease inter-household communication, we integrated connected lights, specifically Phillips Hue and LIFX, with widely adopted messaging services, such as SMS. To support spontaneous communication within and across households, we developed scene creation capabilities involving natural language processing and image search. We also describe features intended to enhance spoken conversation, specifically light adjustment according to speech content and sentiment.