AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

Sharestream : collaborative creation of music playlists on a multi-touch surface:

by C. Zheng




Institution: Delft University of Technology
Department:
Year: 2009
Keywords: interface; multi-touch; music; social interaction; collaborative
Record ID: 1251512
Full text PDF: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:2ce8b16a-9ce7-4a7c-a0a8-066c71a0afcc


Abstract

This master thesis shows how to assitant users to create music playlist collaboratively on a Multi-touch surface in an interface design. The project is sponsored by Philips Applied technology. As Philips gains profound knowledge while manufacturing and selling large display products, the large display technology itself tends to increase in size and decrease in cost. For the future development of it, people in Philips had observed enormous potential with developing applications on large displays by using Multi-touch technology. In order to address suitable use cases to apply to this expanding technology, Philips started this project to explore multiple user interactions with music browsing. The project mainly concerns itself with exploring how multiple users can collaboratively build music playlists. I first conducted research into user context about how people search music, and found out that people tend to mainly search music through performer and title of the song. More importantly, user’s music searching turns out to be a social interaction with others. Later I performed a user study to investigate this aspect. This resulted in a few key findings. When users start to search, they would like to receive recommendations based upon top songs and artists, with the songs that are most popular at the time, the mainstream music, being selected as the primary ones. In addition, they want to build a playlist which best suits the atmosphere, and they also want to achieve a balance between personal taste, and the preferences from others. From the results of the user study, the Sharestream application was designed and built on a multi-touch table, and then tested for the final demonstration. It helps multiple people to build a music party, while browsing music collections spontaneously. Users are able to construct their playlist together in a social way: they can perceive others’ search results and are able interact with them, as well as evoking intensive social discussion during searching. In addition, Sharestream can also enable users to change the playlist they build to suit their mood. For the future development of Sharestream, integration with Philips Ambient lighting technology will play a critical role to create a better atmosphere for users. Developing concepts like Sharestream into Philips’ product portfolio, which evoke social interaction of multiple users, will be significantly beneficial in the future business market.