Idea: Attention API

[Johann Prieur]

Hello,

There's something I'm thinking about for a while that could handle the given
use cases. I'm talking about a Telepathy interface  to handle activities.
Activities are related to rich presence information, there can be two types
of activities : application activity (the user is listening to music,
watching a movie, editing a file...) and verbatim activity (the user is
describing his current activity in a verbatim way).

The first type of activity described here, combined with priority rules,
could be exploited to create the behaviors you're willing (when the user is
reading a stream in the web browser, the music player pauses). The second
one could be exploited by instant messages applications that allow you to
define a personal message, by Twitter and other social networks that give
you the opportunity to broadcast your status.

I think Telepathy is the right place to implement such an API. Several
connection managers could provide that information (for instance, Gabble
could implement http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0108.html, butterfly
could provide the personal message, ...) and a "social network" connection
manager could appear and help as well. If that sounds like a good solution
to you, I'm very interested in working on the definition of such an
interface.

Johann

On Jan 12, 2008 11:22 PM, Scott Peterson <lunchtimemama at gmail.com> wrote:

> Here is the problem:
> I like listening to music. I listen to music while doing almost
> anything else - reading, writing, coding, browsing, painting. There
> are some activities which are at odds with my musical enjoyment -
> watching a video, listening to a podcast or audio book, voice-chatting
> with someone. In the course of my daily web-browsing, I come across
> perhaps ten or more youtube videos. On each occasions I must pause my
> music player (Banshee) before watching the youtube video and resume my
> music when the video is over. I am doing the machine's job for it.
>
> What should happen:
> If I am listening to music and any of the following happens - I play
> video or audio in the browser; I open video or audio from the drive; I
> receive or initiate a VoIP call; I record audio via Audacity or some
> similar program; I do anything else which requires my aural attention
> - the music should pause. When I complete the interstitial task the
> music should resume.
>
> How this should happen:
> The general idea is to have a DBus-based "attention" API. There are
> several ways such a system could work, but here is one example:
> compliant applications report their "attention requirements" through
> the API. For example, when Banshee plays a song, it would report
> requiring "passive aural" attention. When Banshee plays a podcast or
> any file of the "spoken word" genre, it would report requiring "active
> aural" attention. When totem opens a video, it would report requiring
> "active aural" and "active visual" attention. When OpenOffice opens a
> text document, it would report requiring "passive visual" attention.
> And so forth. Some logic then manages attention but culling passive
> spectacles in the event of active spectacles, and restoring the culled
> spectacles when appropriate. This logic could be centralized - when a
> video plays, it tells Banshee to pause; when a video stops, it tells
> Banshee to start again - or it could be distributed among the
> compliant applications - Banshee listens for "active aural" spectacles
> and pauses for their duration.
>
> Other Examples:
> Aside from the very compelling use-case of music, there are other
> situations where such an API could be useful.
> * Presence - Pidgin automatically changes status to "away" depending
> on the state of attention. If no windows are visible and no audio is
> playing, the user is very likely away from the machine and the "away"
> status is appropriate after a very short period of inactivity. If an
> active video is in the foreground, the user is likely at the machine.
> Perhaps "watching movie" is an appropriate status to automatically
> adopt.
> * Screensaver - Similar to presence example, the screensaver should
> not activate if a movie is active in the foreground, despite any
> length of input inactivity.
> * ? - At the moment, every application is coded under the assumption
> that it has the user's full attention at all times - every app is
> oblivious of every other app. The rise of multi-core processors only
> means more multitasking, and empowering application developers with
> attention data will enable new and sophisticated UIs and behaviours
> never before possible.
>
> Road to an API:
> This is an idea I've had for a while and I've given some thought to a
> few of the technical details and problems with this idea, but first I
> would like to gauge the interest of the XDG. If you think this is a
> useful idea, please voice your confidence. If you think there are
> potential problems with this idea, please ask and I'll do my best to
> make up something. If you think this is a terrible waist of time, lay
> it on me! If there's sufficient interest, we can go from there.
>
> -Scott Peterson
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