SMG Projects

s o c i a l....v i s u a l i z a t i o n
. . . . . . . . . . .	Visual Who Virtual Fashion	A community's social patterns -- the gathering together of people with common interests, the rhythm of daily activities, etc. -- provides participants with important social cues about the community's structure and about the identity and affiliations of its members. Yet in the virtual world these patterns, though they exist, can be difficult to perceive. Projects in this area will explore ways of making on-line social patterns visible, tangible or audible.
i n t e r f a c e s ...f o r...c o n v e r s a t i o n
	Chat Circles Loom	Discussions, in the forms of newsgroups, chat-rooms, mailing lists, etc. form the basis of social life on-line. Yet current interfaces are often poorly designed for their social function, making it difficult, for instance, to keep track of the participants in a discussion. Projects in this area will include designs that allow community history to accrue, that visualize non-textual conversational components and that explore new ways of representing the participants in a virtual discussion.
i n t e r a c t i v e....p o r t r a i t s
		Portraits are meant to capture the "spirit" or "essence" of an individual. The traditional approach of the painted or photographed portrait is to create a single image that best represents the subject. Yet the way we form our impression of people we actually meet is quite different: our sense of their personality and character is built up through our interactions with them - we gauge them by how they react to our words and actions. Projects in this area will explore new forms of personal representation by creating portraits that interact with the viewer, portraying the individual through an exchange of actions and reactions.
a u g m e n t e d....s o c i a l....s p a c e s
	Diorama	We live in the real world and it is real world spaces we care about most deeply. Yet virtual objects can be created that have imaginative qualities and functional abilities impossible with physical things. With The Diorama Project we are putting virtual objects in real world spaces. Our goal is to create a system that allows people to build an imaginative parallel universe superimposed on their everyday space.

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Social visualization	Interfaces for conversation	Augmented social spaces	Interactive portraits