The Neem Platform: An Extensible Framework for the Development of Perceptual Collaborative Applications

The Neem Platform is a research test bed for Project Neem, concerned with the development of socially and culturally aware group systems. The Neem Platform is a generic framework for the development of augmented collaborative applications, mainly targeting synchronous distributed collaboration over the internet. It supports rapid prototyping, as well as Wizard of Oz experiments to ease development and evolution of such applications. A novelty of the work is its focus on the dynamic aspects that distinguish group interaction under a Perceptual interface paradigm. Participants’ multimodal interactions such as voice exchanges, textual messages, widget operations and eventually gestures, eye gaze and facial expressions are made available to applications, that apply situated reasoning, using this rich contextual information to dynamically adapt their behavior. The system presents itself multimodally as well, through a set of virtual participants automated entities that are perceived by human participants as having personalities and emotions, making use of animation and voice generation.