Live participation: Augmenting events with audience-performer interaction systems

Tools for supporting performer-audience interaction have been gaining increasing interest in HCI community recently. They encompass a wide range of systems from simple polls to live tweeting and backchannel chats. However, a lack of unifying conceptual framework hampers their efficient development and deployment in events. In this paper, we develop a notion of live participation and present a live participation system that aims to capture performer-audience interaction systems' salient design-relevant characteristics. With user studies, we identify central characteristics of live participation (RQ1) and explore the diversity of types of live participation situations (RQ2). The identified concepts-extended performance, integration work, and episodes-provide the groundwork for further design of live participation systems and more engaging audience interactions.