Augmenting Interpersonal Communication through Connected Lighting.

This paper describes a system, WeLight, that we developed to facilitate communication. It allows individuals to configure the lights in one another's homes as well as their own. We describe this system and its motivation from exploratory interviews with households using existing connected lighting products. To ease inter-household communication, we integrated connected lights, specifically Phillips Hue and LIFX, with widely adopted messaging services, such as SMS. To support spontaneous communication within and across households, we developed scene creation capabilities involving natural language processing and image search. We also describe features intended to enhance spoken conversation, specifically light adjustment according to speech content and sentiment.