As we go about our day we continually cross paths with people we know, and when we run into someone we care about, it’s a special occurrence. But when we are far from our friends and loved ones, casual contact is not going to occur and we can only actively initiate contact through a telephone call, an email or chat message. When the instant messaging clients emerged in 1996, it offered the means to initiate a chat session by showing you who else was online at the same time. This was special, because it allowed you not only to see who else was in front of their computer as you were, but also their comings and goings, and certain explicit “states” of being such as the default “idle” or a more expressive message such as “bored at work”.
I find this feature both a interesting and useful way to be peripherally aware of my friends and relatives, but the interaction is dependent on being in front of your computer. We have picture frames at home that exist to remind us of our loved ones, but they are merely presentational. The concept of the Presence Frame is to give a picture frame the ability to indicate the live presence of the person in the photo. The interaction was designed to be ambient so that there was no activity required of the user to indicate their presence -- I expressly did not want to make a device where a user felt obligated to press a button every day as a way of saying “hello” to a remote loved one. Such a tool would feel mechanical in nature.
Because the sensor is a motion detector, it is also possible that the flickering light of the frame could indicate the presence of a roommate, a partner, a houseguest, or a pet on the other side [The next version of this device will incorporate distance sensors so that movement is not necessary to trigger the reposense, only presence]. It is assumed that as users get used to the device that they will get used to this possibility and perhaps adjust the location of the frame so that it remains in a more personal space. It is also assumed that users will understand that this is a low-fidelity presence indicator, just as instant messaging clients might report that the user is idle only after 10 minutes of inactivity, or that even though they appear idle from inactivity, they are in fact in front of their computers doing something other then typing and mousing.
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