Silhouettell: Awareness Support for Real-World Encounter

Abstract

We have developed a system, called Silhouettell, that provides awareness support for real-world encounters. Silhouettell uses a large graphics screen. People's locations (who and where) are projected as shadows on the screen. The feedback from the shadows allows people to naturally know each other. Silhouettell also selects and presents topics common to two to or more people to make conversations easier to start. The current implementation uses World Wide Web (WWW) pages as the material describing the common topics. Experiments with three users are reported to show how Silhouettell works in practice. We also examined where the system would be best used by polling people from various nations.