Sharing Content and Experiences in Smart Environments

Once upon a time... Stories used to be the only way to pass a message. The story teller would take his audience through the events by mere oration. Here and there he would hesitate, whisper, or gesticulate to emphasise his story or induce the right emotions in his audience. No doubt troubadours were loved, they both brought news of the world as well as entertainment. The urge to share the highlights of our lives with other people has not changed. The means we have available to do that have changed radically. From photo albums we have arrived at an age where anyone with a little computer skills is able to create his/her own multimedia show. Sharing is a matter of pressing the send button in your e-mail system or publishing it via web based publishing systems like Flickr or YouTube. In this chapter we will examine how sharing experiences can be supported by new developments in smart environments. As web-based sharing is reviewed in various other sources, we will limit ourselves to the particularities of sharing in “smart environments”, where we will interpret these environments as including home and public environments as well as nomadic use of services. In order to better understand the nature of our quest, we will first try to elaborate what experiences are and how they could be shared. Subsequently we will review the changing role of end-users of digital services no longer are they just consumers of ready-made content, but active producers of experiences. In order to introduce smart environments we will identify three stages of ubiquitous computing research and briefly review how they have supported experience sharing. From our own research we have selected some projects to highlight different aspects of experience sharing. Finally we will conclude this chapter with a discussion and some indications for future research.