Towards Proxemic Mobile Collocated Interactions

Research on mobile collocated interactions has been exploring situations where collocated users engage in collaborative activities using their personal mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets), thus going from personal/individual toward shared/multiuser experiences and interactions. The proliferation of ever-smaller computers that can be worn on our wrists (e.g., Apple Watch) and other parts of the body (e.g., Google Glass), have expanded the possibilities and increased the complexity of interaction in what we term mobile collocated situations. Research on F-formations (or facing formations) has been conducted in traditional settings (e.g., home, office, parties) where the context and the presence of physical elements (e.g., furniture) can strongly influence the way people socially interact with each other. While we may be aware of how people arrange themselves spatially and interact with each other at a dinner table, in a classroom, or at a waiting room in a hospital, there are other less-structured, dynamic, and larger-scale spaces that present different types of challenges and opportunities for technology to enrich how people experience these (semi-) public spaces. In this article, the authors explore proxemic mobile collocated interactions by looking at F-formations in the wild. They discuss recent efforts to observe how people socially interact in dynamic, unstructured, non-traditional settings. The authors also report the results of exploratory F-formation observations conducted in the wild (i.e., tourist attraction).