The Virtual Literary Salon

A Place for Human-Human Interaction and Verbal Play

Justine Cassell, Nick Montfort, Erin Panttaja, Tara Rosenberger, Adrian
Banard, Jennifer Glos, Hannes Hogni Vilhjalmsson, Obed Torres, Matthew
Sakai, Scott Prevost, Marina Umaschi

You enter through an arch into a room containing tables of different colors and shapes placed amidst a forest of arches. A caricatured image of a young girl (the hostess) solemnly greets you on a screen at the front, intermittently disappearing to surface on various table-tops in the room. The arches make of the room a number of small, intimate environments. Each table seems to be gathering people to different activities; you’re drawn to the comfortable nook in the back which has a clear vantage point of the rest of the space. Once you decide to cross the room to get a cup of coffee, you have no trouble making your way across the cafe - ample space between the arches and tables - yet your sense of the space in the room changes as you walk through it because the thickness of the columns is not uniform.

Having snagged a cup of java at the counter, you sit back and study the crowd. You’d expected a tangle of cables, boxes and isolated overly-focused gamers washed in green light. But the ambiance is more one of people in conversation, and laughter punctuates the dialogues. A circling trail of lights seems to convey messages across the salon; pictures and objects around the room change when the stream of lights run into them. You find that you can actually peek into the contents of the messages—but that the content changes as the message moves across the room. You look at your watch and realize its time to go upstairs for class (you only had a few minutes to begin with). You leave unobtrusively, deciding to come back tomorrow evening-maybe with some friends or maybe not - and check out what might be interesting about those tables.

 

SUMMARY

The cafe is intended to be a social place. In pursuit of that goal, we envision multiple research groups collaborating to create a social environment with electronic enhancements we ourselves can enjoy. The following proposal, inspired by the 19^th century literary salon [1], addresses possible communicative and playful interactions within the space. Although we focus upon the communicative interactions that could happen within the cafe, we take a holistic conception of the cafe to situate and contextualize our ideas. We offer this proposal as a motivation for groups to begin an active collaboration.

ATMOSPHERE, ARCHITECTURE, AND INTEGRATION

People are the center of this literary salon. They can spend a few minutes or a few hours in the cafe. The salon provides room for people to sit and think, listening to or watching the activity. It provides room for people to interact in a small group, at their tables, or in a larger group, virtually or physically. We are interested in providing a place where people can feel comfortable sitting down with friends or by themselves. Encouraging this kind of free movement will also encourage strangers to meet and talk without a virtual technology enhancement.

The architecture and ambiance are distinctively organic. Smooth arches, three of which form spaces for tables that feel personal and intimate, manage to leave every point of the cafe visible from all others. These aesthetic columns also serve as the conduits for the network and power connections from the centralized servers. Table lights are suspended from the ceiling within each arched alcove. Plants in brushed aluminum plant stands, picture frames, and projection screens adorn the floor and walls of the cafe. Some of them are attached to the light network (see Messaging Between Tables) - they change their look periodically - in particular, words from cafe messages are projected on to them. The computer technology employed in the cafe architecture is seamlessly integrated within the architecture and ambiance.

THE TENDER OF THE SALON

The tender of the salon is a virtual character who serves both as hostess and a facilitator of human interactions, supplying part of the atmosphere of the salon. She can appear at various places in the room, and attempts to keep track of the various people in the salon. At times she will approach patrons to suggest group activities, announce events, or attempt to introduce new conversational partners. Sometimes her efforts to introduce people will appear gauche and inappropriate - that’s because the hostess is a nine-year old girl.

By developing a distinct personality, the tender can create a rich, comfortable environment for the patrons to interact with one another. The tender can explicitly work to encourage interactions between different groups of patrons, and her behavior can create opportunities for conversation. But the limited social role of the tender - a nine-year old girl playing hostess while her parents are occupied - reduces the social expectations of the role and provides a way we can create a believable humanoid agent.

MESSAGING BETWEEN TABLES

We propose to create an enabling environment in which people can send messages through a transformative virtual environment, as well as interact with each other in a space. The space of our salon explores how the context of messaging affects the sender and receiver’s channel of communication, and will emphasize the ways messages can be directed, misdirected, mediated, and appropriated. The network that connects the message-sending tables could be based on a combination of Rob Poor’s self-organizing network technology and one of Joe Paradiso’s distance sensors. The sensing and communication network senses the interaction patterns of the people in the cafe, their presence and longevity in specific places, and their use of the artifacts in the room.

A swirling network of lights [2] laid into the floor and walls connects all tables and other objects around the room. The lights trace the round-about (non-optimized) visual path of messages sent from one table to another. Along the route, artistic, discourse, and statistical transformations of the message appear on the intermediate tables, and can be seen, altered, within various displays around the room in time. One such frame would be the Word Quilt, where colored words, fragments and utterances are captured from interactions in the salon and rearranged automatically into a visual quilt according to discourse rules.

At an early stage in the design, we would like to have established aesthetic guidelines for text and other interfaces within the cafe. People should be able to sit back and still read the display. People should feel included and relaxed, and no one should stand on his/her head to read; maybe the display senses how people are distributed around the table. Composing and sending messages should be straightforward. The interface input devices should be either duplicated or distributed around the tables so that multiple people can play simultaneously.

TABLE ACTIVITIES

At a table, a salon patron or group of patrons can participate in activities other than messaging. These will be games and forms of verbal play between the computerized table and the person or group of people at the table. We do not require participation in any game or event from our patrons. They are as free to observe others talking, playing, and mixing as they are to talk, play and mix. Our salon offers opportunities to leave traces, to send messages to unfamiliar others, and to play games with friends. Many people choose to sit at tables and explore the unique affordances of that object. Others sit at tables and talk amongst themselves, interacting with the beauty of the displays on their table and the walls, and the architectural features of the salon. The salon has a lot of tables. Each has different affordances that affect how it conveys and interprets messages that are routed through it, and influences which games it offers to those who gather around it. There are larger tables that seat up to eight people and tiny tables fit for one or two. The shapes vary, but each table has a flat surface monitor with protective coating embedded into it. The largest ones have multiple monitors, or one large projection unit above them. Examples of the sorts of verbal games included with the tables are:

MUG MARKS

Kim goes up to the counter and orders Earl Grey tea, which comes in a large whale mug, where the handle is the whale’s tail. Every mug at the salon is unique, always eliciting comments from the patrons. Kim takes her mug and sits at one of the small tables for two. She places her mug down on the mug holder and fishes out some reading material she brought. When she picks up the mug, she’s astonished to discover that it left behind a mark, like a water mark, but in this case, the mark is a round image of a person’s face which fades away as she looks at it. Intrigued, she places the mug down again for a moment and picks it up. Again, a mark has been left behind, this time of another person. Each time the mug shows other patrons who have used the same mug. And each time, as the mark fades away, text from a conversation with this earlier patron is displayed and quickly fades from the table-top screen.

SHADOW TALK

Christina sits at a table near the wall and notices a ball embedded into the tabletop in the upper right corner. She curiously touches the ball and it rotates. As she does so, a shadow on the wall beside her springs to life, advancing towards another table further down. Christina quickly rotates the ball back into the original position, making the shadow retreat back to her table. After some experimentation, she discovers how to elicit a greeting gesture from the shadow. Mike, at another table, has been observing this and reaches for the ball on his tabletop, making another shadow appear. Mike makes his shadow walk towards the first one, and returns Christina’s greeting. Soon, Mike and Christina are talking away, with their shadows animating their conversation.

MYSTERY TRACES

Alex, who loves mysteries, sits down and pulls up the mystery he’s been reading the last few times he’s come to the cafe. Last night he thought he figured out who did it. He opens to his digital bookmark and clicks to link an audio segment. He speaks aloud: "The butler must have done it because of the missing shoe." He continues reading, and 2 pages later there’s an audio link from "Phantom" who Alex knows from experience is often an excellent sleuth. To his dismay, Phantom counters Alex’s claim and points out, with evidence, that the butler is being set-up by the maid...and so it continues. Readers can choose whether or not to look at the audio files (they might not want to maybe have someone else figure it out) Also, once an audio link is made, it’s permanent: readers can’t go back and delete bad ideas!

CONCLUSION

We hope to create a literary salon that exists in real space, with virtual enhancements. It will be a space for ordinary socializing and local-area networked socializing that does not intrude into the ordinary conversations going on there. The table-to-table messaging will be a non-intrusive way for people to contact others they would otherwise not interact with. The verbal and social games will expose people to traditions of verbal folklore, literature, or social interaction that they may not have been familiar with.

Again, people are the center of this literary salon. They choose how they interact with the artifacts and other people there, but the space enables them to have verbal and social interactions that would not be possible in other spaces.

NOTES

[1] Theodore Zeldin in the book "An intimate History of Humanity" describes the literary salon as "a theater in which each could judge the effect of words and receive a reaction. People of all classes and nationalities met in the salon for conversations which looked at life with the same distance as Socrates had favored, but instead of torturing themselves with self-questioning, they concentrated on expressing their thoughts with elegance."

[2] The network of lights is a partial model of communication that negotiates between the point to point model of computer communication, and the diffuse model of spoken communication (Goffman’s participation framework) in which people can over-hear conversations, join in passing, and participate simultaneously within multiple conversations – albeit with different perceptions of the same message. The light network is meant to be a virtual emulation of a pneumatic network.