Supporting cross-cultural communication with a large-screen system

As opportunities for international collaboration and cross-cultural communication among people from heterogeneous cultures increase, the importance of electronic communication support is increasing. To support cross-cultural communication, we believe it is necessary to offer environments in which participants enjoy conversations, which allow them to share one another's background and profile visually. We believe that the following three functions are important: (1) showing topics based on participants profiles and cultural background; (2) life-sized, large-screen interface; and, (3) displaying objects which show feelings of identify. In this paper, we discuss the implementation and the empirical evaluation of two systems that were designed to support cross-cultural communication in the real world or between remote locations. From the empirical evaluation of these systems, we conclude that these systems add new functionality to support conversation contents, which may be especially useful in a cross-cultural context where language skills are an issue, and this type of environment may be especially useful in a pre-collaboration context.