SOCIAL

The aim of the project SOCIAL is to explore possibilities to facilitate spontaneous and informal communication in spatially distributed groups by exploiting smart environments and ambient intelligence

Spontaneous and informal communication has a strong impact on the productivity, social identity, and wellbeing of work groups.
The spatial distance between peers plays a key role in successfully establishing and maintaining such communication.
In co-located teams, spontaneous communication occurs day-to-day:
People occasionally meet on office floors, at the coffee corner, or have lunch together.
Today, however, we often encounter distributed work settings that impede spontaneous communication between co-workers, as teams are distributed over branch offices located in different cities and countries.

We will approach this problem by exploiting the capabilities of our Spatial Interaction Lab (SIL) to:

• detect situations with the potential for spontaneous informal communication
• represent these situations appropriately to distant users
• enable users to engage in spontaneous and informal communication spanning multiple spatial locations

Collaboration Partners

The project is a collaboration between the Cognitive Systems group af the University of Bremen and the Media Informatics and Multimedia Systems group at the University of Oldenburg.

• Prof. Christian Freksa (Bremen)
• Prof. Dr. Susanne Boll (Oldenburg)
• Dr. Dimitra Anastasiou (Oldenburg)
• Dr. Frank Dylla (Bremen)
• Jasper van de Ven (Bremen)