Back Talk: An auditory environment for sociable television viewing

Video content is being consumed in a host of new ways-viewers are no longer restricted to same-time or same-place viewing. However, the experience of watching with a group is inherently social and often desirable despite the physical distribution of group members. This paper introduces Back Talk, a system designed to create a sociable television watching experience. We enhance TV viewing with an auditory environment around a listener. We have explored and leveraged the richness of audio to convey presence of remote viewers. We have developed a novel framework for capturing and translating engagement of an individual into a set of audio cues that are played spatially around a listener. Such auditory enhancements can augment video content consumption in the future.