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Computer displays can be helpful for making users aware of the remote presence of friends and family. In many of the research projects that have explored the use of novel displays, the real goal is to improve a user's sense of connectedness to those remote loved ones. However, very few have leveraged a user-centered design process or empirically studied the effects of using a display on users' sense of awareness and connectedness. In this paper, we present our multi-phase, user-centered design process for building displays that support awareness and connectedness: Presence Displays, which are physical, peripheral awareness displays of online presence of close friends or family. We present evidence, from a 5-week long field study, that these displays provide significantly better awareness of and connectedness to a loved one, than a traditional graphical display of online presence.
Dey et al. (2006) studied this question.