Our group is designing new social, mobile audio services.  These services are motivated by two major trends.  First, high amounts of bandwidth are increasingly available.  Second, gelled social groups such as teenagers increasingly expect to be in constant contact with each other throughout the day (and even sometimes throughout the night).  Continuous audio communication is enabled by high bandwidth, and audio is highly suitable for social communication because it affords the vocal affect desired by social groups.  However, traditional audio spaces that support continuous audio communication are quite naive, simply passing along all audio from all parties at all times (unless users manually turn off their microphones).  This model is inadequate for continuous mobile social contact, e.g., hearing unaltered audio from your five best friends throughout the day could be very irritating and raise all kinds of privacy concerns.

Our group is developing services that extend traditional audio spaces to meet the needs of social, mobile groups.  One prototype we have developed (nicknamed Mad Hatter) identifies conversations and adjusts audio dynamically to support multiple simultaneous conversations in an audio space.  We have also done fieldwork on young adult use of push-to-talk cellular radios, gaining insight into the use of mobile, audio communication technology that is more lightweight than the cellphone.