Overlaying a virtual and a real table to create an inter-real virtual space

The issue of trust in a virtual community has grown in importance as the Internet has penetrated our daily lives. We believe that "co-creative communication", or creating and sharing a context through physical activities, can support trust building. This paper describes a design strategy and a prototype system for supporting co-creative communication between remote locales. We describe an "inter-real virtual space", which presents a virtual reflection of a local physical space into a remote locale, and which provides an interface space bridging remote locales. We have implemented as a prototype for this concept a "co-actuated table": a round, rotatable disk placed on a stable table. Each site in the "inter-real virtual space" has a "co-actuated table". The rotations of the physical disk at each site are synchronized with the appearance of the virtual disk in the inter-real virtual space, and with the remote disk at other participating sites. A virtual avatar for each participant also appears in the inter-real virtual space. Initial experimental results indicate that this design is suitable for supporting co-creative communication.