Augmented photoware interfaces for affective human-human interactions

Watching, sharing and discussing photographs represents an important social experience with profound emotional connotations. Although digital photoware allows multiple opportunities for indexing, retrieval and visualization of captured photographs, it cannot create the same affectionate, warm and emotionally-rich storytelling environment that tangible paper photos naturally induce. We describe a technique for enriching paper photographs with digital content in order to maintain the charming and desirable context of emotional photo storytelling but also to bring in new features that digital photoware does posses. A simple and easy-to-reproduce computer vision installation that employs visual markers is being described together with several interaction and visualization opportunities that digital creation brings to the traditional photo-talk. The affectionate interaction space of paper photography is being merged in a non intruding fashion with the more cold and impersonal but definitely more expressive digital space. The result translates into an interface that mixes tangible and virtual photoware in a context that preserves and endorses the affective nature of Human-Human interactions.