Sharing experiences through awareness systems in the home

In the current paper we hypothesize that providing peripheral awareness information to remotely located but socially close individuals will yield affective user benefits. An experiment in a controlled home-like environment was conducted to investigate the effects of providing different levels of peripheral awareness information on these affective benefits. In the experiment peripheral awareness aimed to support groups of friends to jointly watch a soccer match at remote locations. The experiment has shown that providing awareness information increases the social presence and the group attraction felt by individuals towards their remote partners. The experiment has provided concrete quantitative and qualitative evidence for the hypothesized benefits of supporting primary relationships through awareness systems and of the relevance of social presence as a requirement in the design of peripheral awareness displays.