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September 15, 2003
Webb on Glancing
Posted by Clay Shirky
Matt Webb of Interconnected has an idea for
glancing, software that supports the kind of non-verbal communication we take for granted in real-world groups.
The analogy I'm thinking of here is a group of people sitting working at their computers. Every so often, you look up and look around you, sometimes to rest your eyes, and other times to check people are still there. Sometimes you catch an eye, sometimes not. Sometimes it triggers a conversation. But it bonds you into a group experience, without speaking.
There's also an
alpha client for OS X to play with.
I participated in some experiments last year using passive video -- not for video conferencing, but rather for the packet-switched equivalent of a glass office door. You could see who was in, and whether they were leaning forward or back in their chair. Unfortunately, it required too much set-up (UDP port forwarding across NATs etc etc) and because the group experimenting with it worked across many time zones, the periods of overlap were small. Nevertheless, as Webb says, the experience was profoundly different from active social software, so a simpler such system might be quite powerful.
Comments (3)
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1. mattw on September 15, 2003 3:58 PM writes...
Sorry, no client available yet. Although the technology works it's still pretty rough. Screenshot here: http://interconnected.org/notes/2003/09/glancing/client_version1.html
Permalink to Comment2. Gene on September 15, 2003 4:25 PM writes...
For the academically minded, some things to look at for inspiration:
Like so many other cool ideas, PARC did it first:
Dourish, P and Bly, S (1992) Portholes: Supporting Awareness in a Distributed Workgroup
Bellcore's Cruiser system was similar:
Root, R (1988) Design of a Multimedia Vehicle for Social Browsing
A host of related work has been done over the decade or so since this work was published. Maybe there are some useful design learnings in the literature.
(Guess html isn't enabled for comments here. Well, grab-and-google should work fine ;-)
Permalink to Comment3. Liz Lawley on September 15, 2003 5:16 PM writes...
HTML isn't enabled, but auto-linking URLs is.
Will think about adding HTML capability.
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