(2024-01-10) Appleton Ambient Copresence

Maggie Appleton on Ambient Co-presence (Ambient Presence). The Context: It's hard to create a subtle sense of shared, synchronous space among multiple people on the web.

We also have no awareness of the other people reading this post, even if they're doing it at the exact same moment.

things have progressed. We now take for granted that our web connections refresh every few milliseconds. We experience most of it in real-time

The synchronous, multiplayer web is brand new, and the design space around it is still relatively unexplored.

The sensation of being in the quiet companionship of someone else, like reading next to them in a cafe, is what we're missing. The sense of ambiently sharing space – of being co-present – while engaged in other activities is a staple of shared public spaces that we're still figuring out how to design in the digital realm. (ParallelPlay, ambient interestingness

The Pattern

Ambient co-presence is the sensation of sharing a space or context with other people, without directly interacting or continuously communicating with them.

The others rarely demand your attention or strike up conversations. They just exist nearby, unobtrusively doing whatever they're doing.

Our current digital attempt at this is multiplayer cursors and selection.

As far as I'm aware, Google Docs was the first to implement this, quickly followed by everyone else.

It's fairly easy to implement this nowadays. My friends over at PartyKit have been exploring ideas ways to enable multiplayer experience with a few lines of code.

Multiplayer cursors can add a sense of shared activity in digital spaces but lacks the ambient quality we're seeking.

They also don't scale.

we could turn the pointy, specific, animated cursor into a softer, fuzzier hint of presence. More like a heatmap

You'd get a vague sense of other people reading live on the page. Perhaps this would feel a bit gimmicky and distracting. Or maybe we'd feel a little companionship. (This is lame.)

allows us to show the presence of a large number of people in a space

It's a soft starting point for layering on more attention-heavy interactions; leaving inline comments, making connections with people who always show up in the same spaces as you, or creating trails for others to follow. (The latter make the former irrelevant.)

Spatial Audio

Spatial audio feels like one of the most promising avenues to explore ambiently sensing many people in a space.

Gather Town has done this well in digital space. It's designed for distributed teams

The clever bit is the video and audio channels of people around you fade in and out as you move closer and further from them.

Annotations and Trails

Annotations and markers left on public websites are less synchronous than the other patterns here, but give us a peripheral sense of other people's activities. (ThirdVoice spam)

Medium shows you the single most highlighted line from other users on article. But only one

Hypothes.is is a browser plugin that does this much better.

I've done a few Silent Synchronous Reading Sessions with friends where we all open the same article, quietly annotate with Hypothesis for 30 minutes, then debrief on a zoom call. It works quite well! (cf parallel writing)

Hypothesis works, but it doesn't feel very alive, reactive, or ambient when you're using it.

References and Further Reading...Ambient Intimacy by Leisa Reichelt, 2007