Visualink: A Minimal & Nonintrusive System for Distributed Awareness

The concepts of "work" and "workplace" have shifted. Although the distributed office provides major benefits in terms of flexibility and mobility, the connection and sense of community that would develop through copresence and visual awareness are often lost. To address these gaps, many interventions have been designed but most solutions are still plagued with issues of reciprocity, aesthetic, interaction, privacy and scalability. We have developed a system, Visualink, that aims to connect distributed teams thanks to interactive video projections, visually breaking down the physical wall between spaces. Our system affords reciprocity to provide a symmetrical interaction and lessen the perception of surveillance, and employs image processing techniques to improve the privacy of its users.