Creating serendipitous encounters in a geographically distributed community.

This paper is focused on the development of serendipitous interfaces that promote casual and chance encounters within a geographically distributed community. The problem is particularly important for distributed workforces, where there is little opportunity for chance encounters that are crucial to the formation of a sense of community. There are three contributions of this paper. (a) development of a robust communication architecture facilitating serendipitous casual interaction using online media repositories coupled to two multimodal interfaces (b) development of multimodal interfaces that allow users to browse, leave audio comments, and asynchronously listen to other community members, and (c) a multimodal gesture driven control (vision and ultrasonic) of the audio-visual display. Our user studies reveal that the interfaces are well liked, and promote social interaction.