The PresenceDetector: Context Awareness for Collaboration

In this paper we introduce a concept of how the status of project partners in a virtual collaboration environment can be transferred in a subtle manner to gain useful information - personal and ambient - for a more efficient working atmosphere and better communication. We broaden Donald Norman's quotation, that what is most important with instant messaging is to elevate the presence detection to a more sophisticated degree of presence. We concluded that the binary character of the information ¿present or not present¿ prevents virtual communication from being very successful and satisfying for the partners. Information sent along with no effort for the sender is very much useful for the receiver. While the well-known ¿sent from my iPhone¿ was first estimated as showing-off, it became soon one of the important metadata, while the receiver can presume that the sender is en route, the laptop is not online, typing is exhausting etc. etc. To reduce the effort of the sender to transmit information about the working situation and nevertheless to enable the receiver to get an impression and an understanding of even this working situation, we developed the concept of the PresenceDetector. To prove the concept we built a hardware and software prototype.