People wish to maintain a level of awareness of timely information, including presence of others in the workplace and other social settings. We believe this provides better exchange, coordination and contact within a community, especially as people work in asynchronous times and distributed locations. The challenge is to develop lightweight techniques for awareness, interaction and communication using 'shared information appliances'.

Aware Community Portals are designed as exploratory responsive displays projected within a casual workspace at the MIT Media Lab. The system currently uses visual sensing to provide relevant information and constructs traces of people's activity over time. Such 'aware portals' may be deployed in casual workplace domains, distributed workgroups, and everyday public spaces.

Aware Portals website

Publications

Nitin Sawhney, Sean Wheeler and Chris Schmandt. Aware Community Portals: Shared Information Appliances for Transitional Spaces. Paper submitted for special issue on Situated Interaction and Context-Aware Computing of the Springer Journal Personal Technologies.