Cross-Cultural Digital Environments

NTT Open Lab/Kyoto University Department of Social Informatics

How can we enhance digital settings to encourage cross-cultural communities to form? We are exploring this issue with three projects that augment digital spaces in different ways. Two projects involve using agents to create a more socially inviting experience; the other uses augmentation of the space and of the visitors' avatars on-screen.

• Digital City Tour Guide:
  an interactive agent which will lead group tours of the Kyoto Digital City.

• Helper Agent for a Virtual Meeting-Place:
  an agent that brings people together using common conversation topics and group formation, to create a more lively and fun online experience.

• Networked Topic-Sharing Mirror:
  a large-screen shared networked video space, with easy-to-use shared object manipulation. visitors' onscreen images will be augmented with information about their own cross-cultural experience and abilities, to help generate better early conversations and community feelings in business teams that must work across cultural boundaries.

last update: 17 December 1999