Fantibles: Capturing cricket fan's story in 3D

Abstract

Sports fans are increasingly using social media platforms like Twitter to express emotions and share their opinions while watching sports on TV. These commentaries describe a intense subjective experience of a fan watching a sport passionately. We see an opportunity to attend to these nostalgic moments by capturing them into a physical form. We present, Fantibles, personalized sports memorabilia that highlights an individual's commentary about sports on Twitter along with the uniqueness of each sports match. As a first case study, we investigate Fantibles for one popular sport, Cricket. We report insights from field deployments of Fantibles during an ODI Cricket match series between India and Bangladesh and offer reflections on the design in the form of four themes: self-expression, layered sense making, ad-hoc interactions and distributed social interactions. We believe our work opens up new interaction possibilities to support social sports viewing experience and design thinking on creating personalized sports memorabilia.