Using a networked infrastructure of easily available sensors and context-processing components, we are developing applications for the support of workplace interactions. Notions of activity and availability are learned from labeled sensor data based on a Bayesian approach. The higher-level information on the users is then automatically derived from low-level sensor information in order to facilitate informal ad hoc communications between peer workers in an office environment.

Recommender systems selectively circulate information enriched with comments and feedback based on people's experience. These systems filter information in a semi-automatic and high-quality way in order to support a community during their work or leisure practices. However recommender systems are usually separate tools that require a degree of effort to be used, both when receiving information and to insert new feedback. In this paper we present our informal experiences with the use of multiple user interfaces (interactive large screen, email, paper and PDA) as means to improve the diffusion of information through an organizational unit and to improve access to information stored within an existing recommender system

The last decade has witnessed a growing interest in what technology can do to sustain communities. Within the Campiello project innovative information technologies have been adopted to support the dynamic exchange of experiences among people living in cities with high levels of tourism, in this way reducing the progressive diminishing of identity suffered by the local communities of these cities. The system developed has been used, for an experimental period, in a neighborhood of Venice, Italy. In the paper, we reflect on the whole Campiello experience, considering all its development phases. These reflections are organized as a set of issues that require attention, respectively, in the design and deployment of community systems, illustrated with examples from Campiello. We believe that due to the relative novelty of community systems, this type of reflection is important to inform the design of future systems such that they better fulfill their objectives and become an integral part of community practices.

This paper addresses the design of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs).More specifically, it considers key design issues concerning the use of either real world 'facsimile' representations or more abstracted means of delivering CVEs.We suggest that the use of ethnographic studies of the context-of-use of the CVE under development is a useful means of informing these design issues in contrast to more in-principle means of drawing conclusions.This approach is illustrated by informing the development of a virtual environment from and ethnographic study of work.

This paper explores the issue of user embodiment within collaborative virtual environments. By user embodiment we mean the provision of users with appropriate body images so as to represent them to others and also to themselves. By collaborative virtual environments we mean multi-user virtual reality systems which explicitly support co-operative work (although we argue that the results of our exploration may also be applied to other kinds of collaborative system). The main part of the paper identifies a list of embodiment design issues including: presence, location, identity, activity, availability, history of activity, viewpoint, actionpoint, gesture, facial expression, voluntary versus involuntary expression, degree of presence, reflecting capabilities, physical properties, active bodies, time and change, manipulating your view of others, representation across multiple media, autonomous and distributed body parts, truthfulness and efficiency. Following this, we show how these issues are reflected in our own DIVE and MASSIVE prototype systems and also show how they can be used to analyse several other existing collaborative systems.

Abstract We present a virtual reality application called VR‐VIBE which is intended to support the co‐operative browsing and filtering of large document stores. VR‐VIBE extends a visualisation approach proposed in a previous two dimensional system called VIBE into three dimensions, allowing more information to be visualised at one time and supporting more powerful styles of interaction, The essence of VR‐VIBE is that multiple users can explore the results of applying several simultaneous queries to a corpus of documents. By arranging the queries into a spatial framework, the system shows the relative attraction of each document to each query by its spatial position and also shows the absolute relevance of each document to all of the queries. Users may then navigate the space, select individual documents, control the display according to a dynamic relevance threshold and dynamically drag the queries to new positions to see the effect on the document space. Co‐operative browsing is supported by directly embodying users and providing them with the ability to interact over live audio connections and to attach brief textual annotations to individual documents. Finally, we conclude with some initial observations gleaned from our experience of constructing VR‐VIBE and using it in the laboratory setting.