NYNEX Portholes is an application for background community awareness based on a concept developed by Xerox [chi92?]. Using a porthole grabber application on a users workstation a snapshot is taken periodically. These images are communicated to a centralized server where they are placed in a database of images.
Using a Web Browser (such as NetScape) members of the portholes community may access this database through a portholes viewer. This viewer displays the most recent snapshots of selected individuals, options to modify preferences, as well as some specialized functions (such as who is looking at me). The individual snapshots also serve as links to that individual's personal communicator, in which images for the past hour may be animated.
One goal of this system is to create an awareness of who is in their office to give a sense of community. Pictures are exchanged between sites (currently between L3D and NYNEX S&T), so that distributed awareness is possible.
We also hope to use this as a starting point to better understand how we can use video to support community interaction.
Here is a demonstration of the system