Sharing Outdoor Activities over Distance through Mobile Video Streaming
At some point, physical distancing measures will begin to lift and people will be more comfortable heading into the outdoors to pursue outdoor activities that they enjoy like hiking, bicycling, jogging, etc. Many people are already doing such activities to stay healthy, while following appropriate physical distancing measures. Yet the reality is that not everyone is able to easily get into the outdoors and do physical activities. Some people may still face strong risks related to COVID-19 due to chronic health situations, weak immune systems, etc. Other people may face health or mobility issues that make it tough or even impossible to pursue outdoor activities. In these situations, it could be valuable to bring people to the outdoors, albeit virtually, in order to raise their spirits and help them feel socially connected to others.
Over the years, my research group and I have explored ways that family and friends can share outdoor activities together over distance through video streaming. Imagine, for example, going on a hike in the outdoors where you are outside hiking and your family member or close friend joins you via a video call from their home. To make it easy, you place your phone in the breast-pocket of your shirt, kind of like what is done in the movie, Her. The camera faces outwards to the world and Skype or FaceTime streams video and audio to your friend. They can see and hear the experience you are taking them on and participate in the hike from their home. The benefit is that you get to do something with your loved one without them having to leave their home. You can converse, you can show them things, and you have a shared experience together.
In one project, we took this idea and applied it to the outdoor game of Geocaching. For those unfamiliar with it, Geocaching is a world-wide treasure hunt where players search for geocaches — small containers that are hidden based on GPS coordinates. Inside the containers are logbooks that people sign when they find the geocache. Larger containers contain small toys that children can trade. Geocaches are often hidden in parks, forests, and urban centres. Geocaching is valuable as a focal activity to study as it contains elements of hiking and site seeing. Thus, it was a great activity for us to explore in order to learn about connecting family and friends over distance in the outdoors.
In our Shared Geocaching experience, we created a ‘quick and dirty’ prototype by taping a mobile camera (Looxcie) to a pair of sunglasses to test out the idea. The mobile camera connected to a smartphone via bluetooth and video was then streamed to a remote family memory or friend over the Internet. This let them go with the geocacher and virtually search with them as they walked around and hunted for geocaches. They could watch the outdoor experience on a phone, tablet, or computer from home. If the geocacher wanted to see the video feed from the person at home, they could glance at their smartphone which was worn in a case on their arm. You can watch a video of the experience here. This work was done before Google Glass was publicly available and we wanted to explore the social benefits and privacy implications with wearable cameras.
We studied Shared Geocaching by having pairs of participants go out and geocache together but in different locations to simulate the idea that they lived geographically far apart. Now this isn’t quite the same scenario as one person being at home and another going out geocaching and virtually taking them, but it is similar enough that some valued lessons can be learned about both types of experiences.
First, we learned that camera work can be difficult. This is the continual reorienting of the mobile person’s camera to get a good view. Because it was attached to a person’s glasses, it was sometimes disorienting for the remote person to watch. For example, the camera view might bob up and down as they walked or quickly change as they turned their head. Participants wished that in addition to seeing the environment, they could also see their friend’s face and facial expressions. Because the camera always pointed outwards, away from the person’s face, this was not possible.
However, the most valued part of the experience wasn’t the video link and seeing the environment. Instead, the most valued part was audio and being able to talk and hear each other. Because the participants listened through earbuds, they experienced a conversation that felt very intimate — almost like whispering in someone’s ear. For example, one participant said,
“He’s like the voice inside my head. Because with the earphones on you kinda shut out the other noises around you. It’s interesting because I’m hearing what he’s hearing. It’s kinda weird that the stuff I’m hearing might not relate to what I’m seeing. You need to get used to that.”
Video was seen as an additional benefit on top of the audio and added to the sense of a close, intimate experience by providing remote viewers with the view as seen by their partners — a view one typically does not get. The level of connection and focus on one’s partner was sometimes so strong that participants became overly focused on their partner rather than their own location and experience. This made them feel close to their remote partner; however, it also detracted from their experience of their own environment. Participants often found it difficult to completely focus on both settings — the connection with their partner and their own surroundings — at the same time. Too much focus on a partner’s view sometimes led to safety concerns about crossing streets or being in close proximity to cars.
Many people in our study were self-conscious about streaming video continuously in a public setting. They did not want to draw people’s attention to the fact that they were streaming video, however, many talked about getting strange looks from bystanders who happened to be around. Because of the looks they were receiving, participants, in general, wanted the technology setup to be less visibly noticeable to others. They wanted to be able to engage in the shared activity, but not make it obvious that they were streaming video to a remote person. Of course, this tends to go against what has been reported in the media where people are quite concerned about surreptitious video recording in public settings. In our case, it was video streaming and not recording, but the challenge is that people can’t easily tell the difference when they look at a camera. Other studies we have done have looked at how bystanders feel about video being streamed in public with them in it, and they have concerns similar to what has been reported in the media.
In another project, we create a ‘bicycling over distance’ experience for family members. We purchased two iPhone bike mounts, which are relatively inexpensive (~$20 each), and attached them to a bicycle. We placed an iPhone into each and had one face outwards to capture a view of the environment, and one towards the cyclist to capture a view of the cyclist’s facial expression. We used Google Hangouts to stream both video feeds to a person who was at home and could virtually go on a bike ride with the cyclist. You can watch a video of the experience here.
For Shared Bicycling, we had two groups of participants try it out. One set was like Shared Geocaching and two people went out cycling together in different areas to simulate connecting over a large geographic distance. The other set had one person go bicycle riding while a person watched from home and could talk to them.
First, people generally really enjoyed the experience. They especially liked taking their remote partner to places they had never been before and seeing new things.
“The best part was I’ve never seen Canada, so that’s like, yeah. The moment we [were riding] it was quite amazing because it’s just someone taking you on a bike ride, and having to see the place around is quite nice.”
Participants who were at home really loved to see their partner’s facial expressions, even more so than seeing the environment. They loved to see the smiling face of their partner, for example.
Bicycling participants only looked at their video feed during times that they deemed were more appropriate, i.e., when streets were not busy, when there were fewer people around. When looking, they recognized the safety need to glance rather than stay focused on the video feed. Most talked about only looking at the video feeds on the bicycles when they were stopped for a moment. This was important for obvious safety reasons.
In Shared Geocaching, conversations tended to come and go. With Shared Bicycling, people talked nearly the whole time. Conversations tended to be about the same things that a pair said they would normally talk about over the phone or when in person. This included their day-to-day activities, relationships, work or school, etc. Thus, conversation was much less about the activity of Shared Bicycling and more about life in general. That is, participants tended to stay with the familiar — what they might normally talk about over video chat — rather than create new kinds of conversations that might focus around the novelty of the activity itself, the act of bicycling, or what they were seeing around them.
“We talked about school, what I did the previous days, what I want to eat later. Normal everyday things we’d talk about while, maybe, walking around or doing other things.”
Similar to Shared geocaching, we found that people had a strong sense that they were participating in an intimate experience with their remote partner. That is, even though they were participating in the activity in a public space and with many others around, the activity and their engagement was heavily focused on their partner as opposed to everything else that was going on around them.
Of course, there were also challenges with the experience. For example, the setup of Shared Bicycling created privacy challenges for participants given the pragmatics of the positioning and mounting of the cameras. Bicycle handlebars are positioned below one’s head and so one of the cameras looked up at the cyclist. This meant that the camera would sometimes show unflattering views of participants that they were not used to providing others. For example, it might show a view ‘up their nose’ or a close-up view of one’s chest or neck. Participants generally felt that such views were too intimate.
So, what can you do? How can you share experiences in the outdoors with family or friends who cannot be with you in person? As can be seen, there are a lot of simple things that a person can do if you have a smartphone. Phones can stream video of an outdoor setting to someone back home, but it can be valuable to have a place to easily put the phone and its camera. This could be in a shirt pocket, or it could be in inexpensive bicycle mounts like we used. It just takes a little bit of creative.
Naturally, there are many more outdoor activities and experiences that people like to have with their loved ones. Take the above knowledge as a starting point and think about how you might be able to connect with your family or close friends in the outdoors and what activities you enjoy. And, of course, make sure you are being safe and follow any guidelines on physical distancing that might currently be in place. It is also important to consider any safety issues related to the activity. For example, bicycle riding in the streets while having a video call may not be the safest. We had participants ride in park settings. The goal with this article is most certainly to not place yourself in harm’s way and create unhealthy or risky situations. Be smart, and enjoy the company of others at the same time.
Some of our papers on the topic:
Neustaedter, C., Procyk, J., Chua, A., Forghani, A. & Pang, C. (2017) Mobile Video Conferencing for Sharing Outdoor Leisure Activities Over Distance. IN International Journal of Human Computer Interaction, 35.103–142. [PDF]
Procyk, J., Neustaedter, C., Pang, C., Tang, A. & Judge, T. K. (2014) Shared Geocaching over Distance with Mobile Video Streaming Proceedings of the Companion Publication of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing New York, NY, USA, ACM, 293–296. [PDF]
Procyk, J., Neustaedter, C., Pang, C., Tang, A. & Judge, T. K. (2014) Exploring Video Streaming in Public Settings: Shared Geocaching over Distance Using Mobile Video Chat Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems New York, NY, USA, ACM, 2163–2172. [PDF]
Biography:
I am a professor at Simon Fraser University in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology. I have studied how people connect with each other, interact, stay aware, and do joint activities over distance for two decades now. As a society, we are currently facing an unparalleled need to be apart via physical distancing, yet we still need to be together, virtually.
My research group and I, along with our collaborators, have studied how many different types of people and relationships connect across distance ranging from workplace colleagues to long distance partners to grandparents and grandkids to friends and other family. This work is found in a whole host of our publications, however, the knowledge is mostly written for other academics, scientists, social scientists, designers, and industrial researchers. Yet I think much of the knowledge is relevant right now for everyday people as the world looks to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic.
I’m going to distill a number of our papers into a way that is likely much more useful to the general public, focusing on the challenges that remote communication creates for people and how they can overcome the issues to stay connected over distance. You’ll find these as blog posts over the coming days and weeks. My goal is to help people, to help people stay connected to those they work with and those they care about. I’m not looking for more citations, accolades, or credit — the goal is to help others with knowledge.
