Casual collaboration [visual interface]

As computers are increasingly used to mediate social interaction, tools are needed not only to support direct communication, but also to create a richer social environment for the networked group. These include tools that provide information about the presence of others and that give the user a sense of the ongoing activities. This paper describes two ongoing research projects in this area. Collaboration-at-a-Glance is a visual interface to an electronic group. It creates an animated image of a remote meeting by compositing pictures of the participants so as to represent their actions. Visual Who is window onto a larger community. Like a window onto a street, it shows the comings and goings of the community members