KokaCam : Showing Presence Information on a Live Camera Image

(Japanese page)
IPLAB Ubiquitous group.
presented at WISS2005 ( shin_wiss2005.pdf, in Japanese)
a demo video (30MB)
a video generated from screen snapshots of KokaCam (112MB)

As instant messengers become popular, presence information also becomes useful information for casual interaction among a group. We propose a new method to visualize presence information using live camera images. Our new method uses live camera images as a basis for representing virtual shared space for a small community. Presence information – activities of users – is visualized as ’smokes’ and effect lines, and superimposed at the seat of each member in the room, which makes easy to understand the mapping between presence information and the corresponding members.

This system is a kind of an augmented reality (AR) system. As opposed to the usual AR system that virtual objects in the real images, KokaCam uses cartoon or MANGA techniques to depict presence information naturally on a live camera image.

Each effect line and image depicts the following information:

	Fire	Frequency of mouse events
	Flash	Frequency of keyboard events
	Smoke	Frequency of events in the past (no events in the present)
	Centralized lines(?)	Only one person is active
	Balloon	Message of the user