Icebreaker NUIs: Encouraging Social Conversations Around Interactive Urban Spaces

Interaction with digitally augmented urban spaces has increasingly relied upon Natural User Interfaces (NUIs) to achieve low-entry levels for the interaction and promote social encounters. In this paper, we discuss two interactive interventions we developed using NUIs for activating two very distinct urban spaces. Despite their highly different contexts and content strategies – one informational, the other playful – we observed that both prompted similar collaborative behaviour among participants, who engaged in conversations with other participants via their digital representation on the screens. To better understand the observed interactions we present a comparative analysis of the two interactive scenarios. Author