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Abstract

Live mobile video streaming is gaining popularity around the world, thanks in part to increasingly pervasive smartphone ownership and cellular broadband coverage. We see an opportunity for mobile video streaming to enable new task-oriented experiences such as remote shopping, virtual interactive tourism, auditing and verification, mobile crowdsourcing, and remote physical-world games. We posit that such applications may eventually lead to new employment opportunities for remote agents in developing countries. In this paper we report our experiences conducting a technology probe for one such use case: an 'escape-the-room' physical puzzle game where some of the team members remotely interacted with a video stream that was produced by other team members who were physically present in the escape room. We designed and built a mobile streaming system called Avatar which we deployed in our study with 26 participants. We report findings from our study, including observations about appropriate communication modalities for remote collaborative game playing, as well as unexpected interactions and points of friction between participants.