Fun, Cool...and Awkward: Preliminary Reactions to Cooperative Photography

Cooperative photography allows two collocated users to collaborate in an image capture activity where one user acts as a photographer and the other acts as the subject. Prior work in digital photography focused on the sharing of photographic content rather than on the image capturing process itself even though the latter is, by nature, a collocated collaborative task. However, it may be challenging for the collaborating parties to attain the necessary degree of synchronized coordination in the image capturing process since they would need to establish visual contact but may not even recognize each other. An exploratory study based on Yousies, a prototype of the cooperative photography technology, revealed behavioral patterns in the user experiences with respect to usage strategy, patience, and motivating factors that can be applied to the interface design of such collocated collaborative applications.