The Time-Mill: An Interactive Mirror for
Evoking Reflective Experiences in the
Home
Lucia Terrenghi Abigail Sellen Abstract
LMU University of Munich Microsoft Research We present the “Time-Mill”: a digitally augmented
Amalienstrasse 17 7 JJ Thomson Ave. mirror and image display device. Built by encasing off-
80333 Munich, Germany Cambridge, UK CB3 0FB the-shelf components in a unique physical form, the
lucia.terrenghi@ifi.lmu.de Asellen@microsoft.com Time-Mill is a cultural probe designed to explore how
visual image capture, tactile input, and aesthetically
Dynal Patel Nicolai Marquardt controlled image replay can provide a basis for
Dept. of Computer Science Microsoft Research reflection, evocation of place, and aesthetic wonder in a
University of Cape Town 7 JJ Thomson Ave. home setting.
Cape Town, South Africa 7701 Cambridge, UK CB3 0FB
dpatel@cs.uct.ac.za t-nimarq@microsoft.com Keywords
Cultural probes, mirrors, images, situated displays,
Richard Harper Mike Molloy homes, families, domestic design.
Microsoft Research Microsoft Research
7 JJ Thomson Ave. 7 JJ Thomson Ave. ACM Classification Keywords
Cambridge, UK CB3 0FB Cambridge, UK CB3 0FB H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g.,
R.harper@microsoft.com HCI): Miscellaneous.
Introduction
As more computing technologies enter domestic
environments, there is great potential not just for
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). augmenting current behaviors in the home, but also for
CHI 2007, April 28 – May 3, 2007, San Jose, USA creating and inspiring new behaviors. Some of these
ACM 1-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. new behaviors may be easily mapped out; others may
require a creative spark either on the part of the
designer or the user. The device we report on here – group at Microsoft’s Research Lab in Cambridge, UK.
the Time-Mill – was developed with the latter goal in This project is part of a larger research agenda into the
mind. With Time-Mill we are seeking to provide a design and social implications of interactive, situated
compelling and engaging experience with images that displays in domestic contexts.
will lead ‘users’ to imagine different ways of mirroring
the present, the past and collaged amalgams of the The work here presented originates from the following
two. research questions: How can interactive displays
support the capture and retrieval of images of family
More particularly, the Time-Mill is a digitally augmented events that occur in particular places in the home? How
multimodal mirror. Like a traditional mirror, it reflects can such displays solicit reflection and evoke memories
in real time the events that occur in front of it. But in a decorative, playful and engaging way? And third,
unlike a traditional mirror, it also captures and retrieves what new experiences and hence lines of inquiry do
snippets of those events and displays them as a such devices suggest?
dynamic collage of images. This collage is deliberately
construed around a particular aesthetic arrangement, More particularly, Time-Mill was designed to answer
namely the movement of ‘leaf’ shapes across the these general questions in the following ways: first, by
screen, each of which contains one of the mirrored dint of capturing images of people; second, by
images. These leaf collages are generated or sought for supporting the ability for people to reflect on the past
through the turning of a physical wheel; hence the through the browsing of those same pictures; third by
name of the device. The result is a playful way of rendering those images aesthetically, seeking to give
encouraging users to engage with mixed traces of such browsing greater delight; and fourth by providing
‘objective images’ and aesthetic ornament. a tactile means of interacting with these reflective
images.
In the first instance, Time-Mill is being explored
through our own reactions to and experiences with the Though carefully designed and constructed, it is worth
prototype in the laboratory. In the future, exploration noting that Time-Mill is not intended as a product, but
of the device will occur through long-term deployment rather is an experience prototype or cultural probe
in other households. There the goal will be to see how designed to solicit insight on these dimensions: the
families might interact and engage with such an object visual, the browsing, the aesthetic and the tactile.
in the course of their everyday lives over time.
Method
Background We arrived at the concept of the Time-Mill in the
The design of the Time-Mill mirror results from the following way: We began with a preliminary field study
close interdisciplinary collaboration of an industrial consisting of in-depth interviews with eight adults from
designer, a computer scientist, a social scientist and a different nationalities, professional backgrounds, and
cognitive psychologist within the Socio-Digital Systems households. The households included couples living
with young children, couples with grown children, Relatively few images are sent, via e-mail, to
couples with no children, and single parents. Our friends and family. Even fewer are printed and sent
questions addressed topics such as: by post (e.g., to grand parents).
A small proportion of images are framed and hung
General aspects of each household: members of on the walls, or archived in albums.
the immediate and extended family, their ages, Once framed, images are hardly ever changed or
geographical distances between them and typical moved to different places in the household.
communication patterns.
The browsing of the digital photo archives is
Routine kinds of social gatherings within the family: sporadic and usually done on the PC by one or two
i.e., reunions, rituals, celebrations. people, hardly ever in bigger groups.
Social life within the household: the kinds of people
who visit, the events that occur in the house and Given these facts, the question then arose as to why
characteristics of those events. users make the effort of taking images in the first
The material properties of the house itself: its age, place. Our inquiry indicated that this was motivated by:
layout, changes, decoration, the use of spaces for
visitors, family activities, etc. A desire to safely record and maintain records of
How persons and events are captured in the social relationships constitutive of family life.
domestic social context: the mechanics of this, A related sense of responsibility towards the next
responsibility for it, storage and display of images generation to ensure that a kind of heritage and
and memories, by whom and for whom, etc. honouring of family members and their evolution is
documented (e.g., baby photo-albums).
While we cannot present all the results of the analysis A trust in the future of digital technology
here and nor, further, can we elaborate the relationship (especially for its capturing and storing
of our findings to those of other studies reported in the affordances) despite a lack of immediacy (because
literature, these interviews helped us to define what of the limited affordances for immediate and social
Anderson calls a ‘space for design’ [1]. This space was browsing of traditional displays).
built on the following foundations:
With these foundations and motivations understood, we
Households increasingly capture family events and then sought to place a creative element in our
social contexts with digital cameras. reasoning by juxtaposing these image-capturing
Most of the pictures taken are not displayed but are practices against another, much neglected but common
stored on the PC of the camera owner. ‘imaging’ technology in home settings, namely wall-
mounted mirrors. Although mirrors are mundane
familiar artifacts, they have interesting affordances angle digital camera is embedded in the mirror frame
when juxtaposed with digital image capture. (see Figure 1).
Unlike digital cameras, which are optimized to show
images after the event, mirrors are designed to reflect
the “here and now”. In doing so, they augment physical
space through the literal reflection of the light in that
space. In another sense, they reflect the activities that
occur in front of these surfaces. Finally, unlike cameras,
mirrors add value to where they are located in the
home in different ways: those in the dining room have
a different value to those in the bathroom, for example.
Having considered these affordances, we decided to
build a probe that mixed the properties of digital
imaging, archiving and display with those of domestic
mirrors. We sought a device that could let us
investigate how we might create a digital mirror for the
home setting which would also allow the capture and
retrieval of those same ‘mirror images’. We sought Figure 1. The components of the Time-Mill mirror: a tablet PC,
also, a device that could allow users some kind of direct a control wheel, a digital camera, a see-through mirror.
control of the capture and display of those images and
which, at the same time, would provide a new aesthetic As a user rotates the wheel, a melody is played (similar
experience. We wanted a mirror that was more than a to the interaction with a music box), and an animation
mirror, and a digital camera that worked in a new way. is displayed on the tablet screen. Leaves appear,
In essence, we wanted a bridge between seeing in real flowing from left to right, visible through the mirrored
time and seeing the past. glass. This animation is intended to metaphorically
evoke the flowing of time, and to suggest the capturing
The result was Time-Mill, an artifact embodying a and remembering of impressions or snippets of the
design which we hope can give special value to the events occurring in that place.
social spaces of the home.
When the wheel is rotated in a clockwise direction, at
The Time-Mill Interactive Mirror random moments, Time-Mill takes a picture, capturing
The Time-Mill artifact consists of a physical wheel an image of the person engaged with the device (see
coupled with a mirror: a Tablet PC is mounted behind a Figure 2). Within the leaves, these images are
semi-transparent mirrored piece of glass and a wide- sporadically shown.
When users rotate the wheel in the opposite direction, function and the meaning conferred on them depending
a similar animation and melody begins, but the pictures on where they are situated in households can be
that are framed in the leaves are now the ones important. These matters can provide resources for
captured and stored in previous interactions, when the imagining what looking, seeing, reflecting and capturing
same (or maybe other) people played with the artifact might entail in the future.
in the past. Such pictures are randomly selected from
bundles of pictures created previously, and are Thus it seems to us incorrect to believe that what a
retrieved in reverse chronological order. mirror might reflect is some objective, visual ‘record’ of
an event. In our view, a richer more subtle
understanding recognizes that what a mirror reflects is
bound up with purpose and this in turn is related to its
place in the home. In other words, a mirror might be
placed in a hallway to provide visual ornament; in a
bathroom to provide a line of sight to one’s own skills
at self-presentation and cleanliness; or in a dining room
to reflect events that occur in that place that matter.
This is, crudely speaking, to note a mapping between
place and function, and indicates that what we seek to
see and how we might want to see are bound to
moralities, to ways of life. It seems to us that once we
have recognized that this is what mirroring, seeing,
showing and so forth is about, we can begin to explore
the relationship between places, intentions and ways of
Figure 2. Interaction with the Time-Mill mirror.
looking in manners that are richer than is ordinarily the
case in CHI research.
Discussion
Time-Mill raises a number of questions that we think Put in another way, this is not simply to draw a
are relevant for discussion in the design and CHI distinction between rational and emotional purposes for
communities. The first is essentially conceptual but it design; nor is it simply to think about ways in which
leads on to empirical matters. These in turn lead to digital augmentation can expand the time and
questions of design. It has to do with the exploration of geographical scope of ordinary objects such as mirrors.
new ways of looking, seeing, reflecting and capturing in Rather, it is to broaden our conceptions of such objects
home settings (or indeed elsewhere). In the CHI in other ways: to consider new design concepts in such
community, we often give little thought to artifacts as a fashion that the purposes of looking, seeing,
prosaic as mirrors, but the relationship between their reflecting and capturing can be expanded.
This is what motivated Time-Mill. Our experience of it Similarly, we learned that the method of interaction
in-house is of course only the first stage before could take other forms too. The ‘wheel’ could take
exploring its use in home contexts. Even so, it is worth many shapes, even shapes which are not like wheels at
making a few further remarks based on our use so far. all: the flower shown on this version is a case in point.
First of all, we have found that Time-Mill does not A third and yet not inconsequential set of findings are
create visual experiences that necessarily trigger or methodological. We have found that the importance of
reflect memory. Rather it does two things which are these aesthetic values only became clear once the
orthogonal: On the one hand it provides visual material device had been built and experienced. Here, we had
that evokes new experiences, new reflections on the an initial concern that whatever choice we made would
moment itself: the images become part of what is occlude our understanding of the situated values of
experienced in the ‘here-and-now’. On the other, its Time-Mill as a means of recollection. But building Time-
‘peculiar’ rendering of things done evokes the past in Mill made clear that there is no ‘objective’ record to be
ways that makes that past different from how it was conveyed (as if it were a trace somehow embodied in
experienced in the first place. If the mind has a mirror the mind’s eye) but instead a creative interpretation of
on its past, Time-Mill shows a past that is contrasting: what might have been. In light of this, our minds were
not as seen, experienced and recollected, but through a opened up to the possibility that we could create other
playful, distorting but not discordant lens. It seems to interpretations of the past. If the value of the device
us that to grasp the past here is not to capture one’s lies in its creative generation of that past, then we are
own past, but is to touch something different. no longer threatened by the fear that it might be lost.
If this is the first set of learnings we take from Time- In this view, the past is another country, as L.P. Hartley
Mill, a second set has to do with the aesthetic would have it, because people do indeed do things
experience it frames. Here, we learned from Time-Mill differently there. We can think of Time-Mill therefore as
that there are many new ways of looking that we could a mirror onto a past of its own making. In turn, our
create. Our experience has suggested that the leaf making of Time-Mill has opened up for us a future of
design appealed to many but alternatives could be new design possibilities.
imagined. Thus it could be balloons or bubbles, cars or
boats; the shaping or the framing of the caught images References
giving new meaning to those same images. This, as we [1] Anderson, R.J. (1994). Representations and
say, is important given that the aesthetic creates a requirements: The value of ethnography in system
design. Human-Computer Interaction 9: 151-182.
different past, a different view, and a mirror onto a
world that was not as experienced or recollected except
through the Time-Mill device itself.
Interactivity Supplement
CHI 2007, San Jose
CONTACT INFO
First Name Lucia
Last Name Terrenghi
Organization LMU, University of Munich
Street Address Amalienstrasse 17
City Munich
State/Province
Country Germany
Postal Code 80333
Daytime Telephone +49 (0) 178 6635711
Email lucia.terrenghi@ifi.lmu.de
URL https://wiki.medien.ifi.lmu.de/view/Main/LuciaTerrenghi
DESCRIPTION
Title: The Time-Mill: An Interactive Mirror for Evoking Reflective Experiences in
the Home
Project Description:
Time-mill is an interactive multimodal mirror, which plays with temporal fragments
of the life that is staged in front of it. Like a traditional mirror, it dynamically
reflects in real time the scenes taking place in front of it: but it differs in that it can
capture and retrieve fragments of these staged scenes as people interact with it,
simultaneously augmenting the present with traces of the past.
Our main goal is to understand how the design of interactive hybrid products
such as Time-mill can affect social and interactional behaviors and stimulate
reflection on time and space.
PRESENTATION HISTORY
This work has not been presented or demonstrated. We believe this demo is
worthwhile for the CHI 2007 venue as it will provide a novel and entertaining way
of capturing CHI attendees and their social circles.
ENVISIONED INTERACTION
The Time-mill prototype consists of a physical control wheel, a Tablet PC, a one-
way mirror and a webcam (see Figure 1). All these components are housed
within a single case.
Figure 1: Left, the Time-mill prototype. Right, the Time-mill components: 1 = physical control
wheel, 2 = Tablet PC, 3 = one way mirror, 4 = webcam.
Users can interact with the prototype by rotating the physical control wheel.
When the wheel is rotated a melody is played and an animation shows leaves
flowing across the screen. The animating leaves metaphorically evocate the
flowing of time and the human possibility of capturing and remembering just
some snippets. The one way mirror is used to create an illusion that allows us to
superimpose these snippets of the past on a reflection of the present (see Figure
1, left image).
The idea is for users to first frame themselves in the mirror and then rotate the
wheel clockwise to capture the moment. The resulting picture is then framed
within a large leaf that is animated across the screen from left to right (see Figure
2). Smaller leaves also accompany the large leaf across the screen as part of the
artistic effect. The rate at which leaves animate across the screen is directly
proportional to the wheel rotation speed. Once the largest leaf is animated off the
screen, another picture is captured to begin the next cycle, provided the wheel is
still being rotated.
Figure 2: Screenshot of the Time-mill animation when rotating clockwise “Capture Mode”
When the wheel is rotated anti-clockwise, a similar animation is displayed. Only
this time the leaves flow from right to left, displaying pictures from previous
moments or episodes that were captured and stored (see Figure 3). The large
leaf is used to show the current picture which the system picked from an episode.
In this mode some the smaller leaves frame other images, which are used to
provide a preview of the upcoming episodes. Episodes are ordered
chronologically, showing the most recent first and are delineated by detecting
long periods of inactivity. In this mode, the wheel rotation speed performs a duel
function. Firstly, it provides a way of controlling the rate at which images animate
across the screen. Secondly, it is used to select the next image to be framed in a
large leaf. This is based on a logarithmic scale to provide a fine and course
grained navigational control. When rotating slowly you can view each successive
image in an episode. When rotating quickly you can skip entire episodes. If the
user stops rotating the wheel, the large leaf remains stationary on the screen.
After a predefined period of no interaction all the leaves animate off the screen,
leaving the prototype in its stationary state as a normal mirror.
Figure 3: Screenshot of the Time-mill animation when rotating anti-clockwise, “Browse Mode”
TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS
SPACE AND FLOOR PLAN
The prototype dimensions are 40cm X 30cm X 6cm, and it weights 6Kg. It needs
to be fixed to a wall using three screws, two at the top of the frame and one the
bottom of the frame. The top of the frame should be 170cm from the floor. The
ideal location would be in a communal space, where there is sufficient space on
either side of the prototype for people to gather around it.
Only one person can rotate the wheel at a time. However, three or four people
can be gathered around it at any time. The wide angle webcam ensures that they
can all get captured at once.
Wall Time-mill
0.3m
0.4m
2.4m 0.4m 1.7m
Plug
Floo
2m 2.4m
FLOOR VIEW WALL VIEW
ACOUSTICAL
The prototype produces sound. It plays various melodies when people are
interacting with it. As such, it needs to be in a location where it will not cause a
disturbance and the environment is not too very loud either.
LIGHTING
The prototype does not require any special lighting conditions. Ideally, though, it
should be mounted in a room that is not lit too brightly.
TIME
The demo should run throughout the conference. It can accommodate up to
three or four people at a time. We anticipate that groups of people will use the
prototype for 5 to 10 minutes.
COMPUTATIONAL EQUIPMENT
We do not need any computational equipment. We will transport the prototype to
the conference venue.
NETWORKING
We do not need any internet or network connections.
POWER
Our demo will require 1 plug for electric power.