Ambient Co-Presence by Maggie Appleton

We currently have no visual, audible, tactile, spatial, or embodied awareness of one another. We also have no awareness of the other people reading this post, even if they're doing it at the exact same moment. (View Highlight)

The synchronous, multiplayer web is brand new, and the design space around it is still relatively unexplored. (View Highlight)

The sensation of being in the quiet companionship of someone else, like reading next to them in a cafe, is what we're missing. (View Highlight)

Our current “multiplayer” experiences draw too much attention to the multiplayer-ness. The other people around you demand attention. They move. They flash. (View Highlight)

This looks like quietly reading on the back porch with family, sitting in a cafe full of people softly chatting or tapping away at laptops, or people watching from a shabby seat on the London underground, marvelling at the vast array of people that can exist in a single space. (View Highlight)

They're better when used for smaller-scale, closed contexts like private teams and internal work. (View Highlight)

Spatial audio feels like one of the most promising avenues to explore ambiently sensing many people in a space. Sound naturally follows a spatial gradient in physical space; people close to you are louder, and people further away are quieter, with many shades in between. (View Highlight)