This paper presents work in the field of distributed exertion games, which are controlled by moving the body. People play these games together while being located at different places in the world. The novel contribution of this paper is the introduction of distributed team play in which both collocated and distributed players participate. In our Distributed Interactive Pong Playground (DIPP) pl...

Previous studies have shown that website design elements (such as text and pictures) can be manipulated to increase the perception of Social Presence (SP) among online consumers, which can then impact trust, usefulness and enjoyment. This paper seeks to determine if the impacts of infusing SP in websites is culture specific or universal. We were able to demonstrate similar results with Chinese ...

Recent work by our group at Motorola Labs has focused on applying the principles of ambient interfaces to the domain of mobile communications. Our methods incorporate both formative ethnographic studies and field evaluation of prototypes to investigate how people make use of ambient information in the course of everyday communication. Our goal is to enable applications that provide rich presenc...

To have buildings that are able to adapt to the user needs and at the same time to operate efficiently, it is essential to know the activity the people are performing. Presence sensors, which are widely deployed in modern buildings, attempt to regulate lighting to the presence of people in indoor spaces. Though, much more in terms of comfort and energy efficiency can be achieved if more detaile...

This document defines an XML format for the representation of civic location. This format is designed for use with Presence Information Data Format Location Object (PIDF-LO) documents and replaces the civic location format in RFC 4119. The format is based on the civic address definition in PIDF-LO, but adds several new elements based on the civic types defined for Dynamic Host Configuration Pro...

This paper investigates how human warmth and sociability (social presence) can be integrated through the Web interface to positively impact online trust. An empirical study was undertaken to explore the impact of various levels of socially-rich text and picture design elements on the perception of online social presence and its subsequent effect on online trust and its antecedents. Higher level...

Trust is considered to reduce uncertainty, and, therefore, is a prerequisite for people to engage in online transactions. Social presence potentially bridges the discrepancy between offline and online commerce in terms of face-to-face interaction. These concepts are often studied under the assumption that social presence in itself increases trust. In addition, these studies typically treat trus...

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships of the students’ perceived levels of collaborative learning, social presence and overall satisfaction in a blended learning environment. This research studied the relationship of these three variables and identified critical factors related to them. The participants were 48 graduate students who took a blended-format course in health ed...

Research Article

In this paper we investigate group maintenance behavior in community-based Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development teams. Adopting a sociolinguistic perspective, we conceptualize group maintenance behavior as interpersonal communication tactics—specifically, social presence and politeness tactics—that help maintain relationships among group members. Developer email messages were col...