Matt Webb, at the Emerging Technology Conference, introduces Glancing:
Glancing is an application to support small groups by simulating a very limited form of eye contact online. By small groups I mean about 2 to a dozen people. What I mean by eye contact hopefully I'll explain in the course of this talk. ... Telepresence is a huge topic ... In a nutshell, we're interested in the subjective feeling there are other people nearby, and that you all feel like the *same* people are there. That's social copresence. And presence is good because it does things like improve social judgement and improves learning ability and memory. All you really need for presence is to be able to detect the actions of another person on your computer. It can be anything above seeing whether the other person has turned the application on or not. Realism, little avatars or faces, isn't important. ... So right, I've being going on about small groups and visibility, but I want to put this in a wider context. The lack of easy sociability in cyberspace and the need to augment our senses to understand the online world, instead of just being able to interpret all this information naturally, isn't just a characteristic of, I don't know, certain applications like instant messaging. It's symptomatic of a much broader *cyberspace nature*, and I've got a couple of recommendations for where we should be looking to figure out what to do with this in the next few years. ... The idea is that by compressing complex data and presenting it in a way that minimises cognitive overhead, we can have a kind of background awareness of otherwise difficult to understand qualities.
This is a fascinating talk, containing far too much interesting, stimulating material to be summarised here without doing it a gross dis-service.
