"Tabletop Community" is an artwork that records interactions among users around a table. The artwork also visualizes a social network of users from data that show these interactions; the piece can present that network to other users as well. Its theme is self-recognition, which emerges from social interactions with others in a human network. It is intended to offer experiences of looking back at a user's past interactions with others within the perspective of a group (social network) in a visual manner. We have shown the artwork at Ubicomp2005. The paper shows the types of interactions, inferred from collected data and comments from the audience, which have delivered some improvements in the artwork since its original version.

We have undertaken a research project that visualizes a community, especially for events such as academic conferences. As research progresses, we have noticed that small gatherings of a few persons happen during events as a vital component of forming a community. We call these happenings Social Interactions. Typical situations that foster Social Interactions include gathering around a table. Therefore, we think it is possible to visualize larger communities through obtaining and processing Social Interaction data via table-like interfaces.As one part of group research project, here we introduce an art piece, named "Tabletop Community", that enables the visualization of Social Interactions around the table. Through this artwork system, users/participants easily record the state and atmosphere of each Interaction. The system visualizes the state of the entire community as an interactive network visualization. Here we introduce past results along with the current progress of the system.