Very often today people are depending on distant social communication to maintain contact with their working groups or families. This distant communication happens often very abruptly without any awareness signal in advance. This paper presents a Wizard-of-Oz user study based on awareness signals, specifically illumination and sound effects, which were triggered by an experimenter before the communication started. Participants had to test a distant vs. a close light vs. a sound effect vs. combination of light-sound vs. absence of any signals. Although the distant light was in the periphery of the focused attention of the users, it was generally better accepted, though less perceptible than the close light. Promising results towards “peripheral awareness“ show that the existence of triggered awareness signals in the unobtrusive periphery transmit a communication message fluently to the users.
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