Immersive Spaces 1.0: WP4 Mediated Presence Components

COMPEIT creates a web-based system for highly interactive, personalised, shared media experiences. The new technologies will improve the feeling of being together in a shared mediated space and support interaction and collaboration between people who are separated in time or space. Immersive spaces 1.0 is a software component for the COMPEIT presence system with a feature set that allows users to interact and perform shared actions in virtual spaces, simply using their web browser. The main features are called SharedSpace , a virtual 3D environment which users can redesign and populate by scaling and rearranging their avatar-like live videostream representations; and PixelPresence which is an overlay technique that offers a pixelated view of a livestream, hereby adding an ambient and discrete presence filter, which indicates movement and subtly prompts users to enter a mediated interaction. The COMPEIT presence system supports individuals and distributed groups who want to stay close with one another on a regular basis, ready to spontaneously interact in mediated and virtual space. Feedback from users and user requirements in WP2 showed that people want to be subtly aware of what others are doing, and if they are at a particular place at a given time – which, of course, is quite different to keeping a videolink open 24/7. Whether the context is professional or social, ambient forms of presence are thus called for, in order to support gradation and, perhaps more importantly, to prompt users to join a shared virtual space.