As part of the EU-funded interLiving project, I have collaborated with researchers and families from Sweden, France and the USA to design new technologies to support coordination and communication among diverse, distributed, multigenerational groups of friends and relatives. Part of this work consisted in distributing technological probes [1] to the families to provide them with ideas of the technologies we envisioned and get new inspirations and feedback from use in real-world settings.
VideoProbe [2, 3] is the first technological probe we (INSITU and HeHe) developed for this project. It is a
device that allows a group of people to share their daily lives by
exchanging pictures. It consists of a white box combining a screen and
a video camera, connected to the Internet through a computer and a DSL
(or cable) connection. A dedicated software running on the computer is
responsible for taking pictures and presenting the ones taken by all
the connected VideoProbes.
Some pictures are available, as well as a video (13 Mb) illustrating how the system works. More information on interLiving is available on the project's Web site.
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