Large public screens are proliferating in public spaces. Today, most of them arestandalone installations that display advertisements in the form of slides, short movies, or stillimages. However, it is not hard to imagine that these displays will soon be connected throughthe Internet, thus creating a global and powerful communication medium capable of providingrich, interactive applications. We believe that such a medium has the potential to fosterconnections within and between communities in public spaces. In this paper we present aresearch agenda for interacting places, i.e., public spaces that connect communities throughpublic displays. We then report on our initial work in this space, in particular on using publicdisplays for creating what we call identity cognition – increasing the sense of being connectedbetween community members occupying the same space. We have investigated two options forachieving identity cognition: (a) through content that originates from the environment, and (b)through content that originates from people. Content originating from the environment portraysinformation about a display’s surrounding. For this type of content, identity cognition is usuallybeing achieved implicitly by stimulating the effect of ‘triangulation’, an effect whereparticularities of the physical space act as links between people. Content originating frompeople, on the other hand, explicitly achieves identity cognition by promoting community valuesthrough content that expresses the attitudes, beliefs, and ideas of individual communitymembers. We have built and deployed two public display applications that support identitycognition using environmentally-sourced content and people-sourced content, respectively.    «

Large public screens are proliferating in public spaces. Today, most of them arestandalone installations that display advertisements in the form of slides, short movies, or stillimages. However, it is not hard to imagine that these displays will soon be connected throughthe Internet, thus creating a global and powerful communication medium capable of providingrich, interactive applications. We believe that such a medium has the potential to fosterconnections within and between communities in pub...    »