Abstract
Photo sharing is becoming a common way of maintaining closeness and relationships with friends and family, and it can evoke pleasurable, enjoyable and exciting experiences. People have fun when sharing photos containing pleasant scenes or friends being caught doing something interesting. There has been a recent increase in studies that focus on the visualisation and sharing of photos using online services or sharing in the home environment using different digital technologies. Although previous studies have focussed on the important issues of photo sharing and visualisation, there is a dearth of research aimed at designing applications that enable people to share and visualise multiple photo streams that originate from multiple sources such as different people or capture devices. In addition, there is a lack of research that links new applications for photo sharing with user experience and the applications' value to the user. This thesis, firstly, offers a new design for synchronous sharing and visualisation of multiple photo streams using temporal and social metadata. Moreover, different features, called transition modes, were added to the system to give a better experience within the system. The experience of photo sharing, however, does not exist without any connection to people or events; it is a social experience depending on people, places and time. Hence, an experimental study was conducted with twenty users, and the results demonstrate high user demand for concurrent presentation of multiple media streams as well as recommended transitions for extending its potential. In the second phase of this thesis, the temporal aspects of multiple photo streams such as manual transition, continuity detection and user desired time were designed and implemented. Following that, the results of the user study demonstrate good comprehension of the users' own and shared photo streams, and their temporal structure, even when presented at relatively high speeds. Users were easily able to contextualise events, recall specific photos and find them using the proposed interface. The final interface is built from the lessons that were learned from the first two phases of this study. In this version, the user was able to share their photos in real time and see them in an ambient display. Our final system for real-time photo sharing as an ambient display was tested in three different trials with three different user groups consisting of extended family, close friends and workplace colleagues. The results showed high user interest for extended family members and in the workplace environment.