Camera Phones and Image Acts

I've been interested in Camera phones for a long time. Most recently for shooting video collectively, and before that for reading barcodes and other indicia in Active Print. Originally, however, I and colleagues Abi Sellen, Mirjana Spasojevic and Rowanne Fleck carried out a thorough study of what people did with their camera phones and why.

Publications

We are cameras - image acts in personal interaction, appears in issue #15 of Vodafone's receiver magazine.
The Ubiquitous Camera: an In-depth Study of Camera Phone Use, appears in IEEE Pervasive Computing, April-June 2005 (Vol. 4, No. 2), pp. 42-50. This paper describes a study carried out in the UK & US in summer 2004. It is joint work with Mirjana Spasojevic of HP Labs, and Abigail Sellen & Rowanne Fleck of Microsoft Research, Cambridge UK. A more detailed paper, "How and Why People Use Camera Phones", is available as HP Labs technical report HPL-2004-216 or Microsoft Research technical report MS-TR-2004-127.
"I Saw This and Thought of You: Some Social Uses of Camera Phones" was published as a short paper in CHI 2005. The paper is available as HP Labs technical report HPL-2005-37.

Of related interest is this HP Labs report, which documents the fall-off of interest in moblogging at a particular site. While there are sites that cater to mobloggers with specific public interests such as food, other moblogs may be missing the point of the "image acts" for which users actually use their camera phones. Those consist mainly of social interactions, often based on common ground shared with a highly selected audience, and capturing and carrying for personal affect (see our report).