Beyond Show of Hands (CHI 2021)

Note: Our CHI 2021 paper introduces a framework and a system that enables scalable viewer visual communication in live streaming.introduces a framework and a system that enables scalable viewer visual communication in live streaming. Work with John Joon Young Chung, Hijung Valentina Shin, Haijun Xia, Li-yi Wei. For more details, see this excellent summary post from John.

Live streaming is gaining popularity across diverse application domains in recent years. A core part of the experience is streamer- viewer interaction, which has been mainly text-based. Recent sys- tems explored extending viewer interaction to include visual ele- ments with richer expression and increased engagement. However, understanding expressive visual inputs becomes challenging with many viewers, primarily due to the relative lack of structure in visual input. On the other hand, adding rigid structures can limit viewer interactions to narrow use cases or decrease the expressive- ness of viewer inputs. To facilitate the sensemaking of many visual inputs while retaining the expressiveness or versatility of viewer interactions, we introduce a visual input management framework (VIMF) and a system, VisPoll, that help streamers specify, aggregate, and visualize many visual inputs. A pilot evaluation indicated that VisPoll can expand the types of viewer interactions. Our frame- work provides insights for designing scalable and expressive visual communication for live streaming.