Communications get Pasion with more than mere words

Thanks to European researchers involved in Pasion (Psychologically Augmented Social Interaction Over Networks), however, that is about to change. The EU-funded project boasts among its partners the best and the brightest in high-tech approaches to non-verbal communications. It also includes telecommunications heavyweight Telecom Italia, which says it may be able to incorporate some of the innovations of the PASION research into real-world projects. Telecom Italia has built the service-orientated architecture needed to support real-life applications, while the Helsinki School of Economics built tools to augment voice, text and instant messaging with non-verbal information, and the University of Lincoln developed Familiars – an online social game that incorporates facial expression analysis, psycho-physiological data and social indicators based on user interactions. According to Richard Walker, PASION's chief of dissemination, all these tools combine to approach a new language for non-verbal communication. "For example, we could have biosensors monitoring heart rate, pulse, body temperature and so on, to establish the state of arousal of your correspondent," he says. Other tools can be used to identify the facial expression of a person, to map the relationships in a group. "How this will be used we can't say just yet, but we can say there are many applications, and while older people are perhaps a little bit hesitant about revealing their state of mind, young people and people who use social networking sites are very keen," says Walker. But PASION is not just for play. "Many problems in collaborative work derive not from the need to communicate and share explicit information, already met by current groupware and communication tools, but from higher-level problems in coordinating these processes," explains Walker. "For example, misunderstandings, or the erroneous attribution of intentions can cause problems for groups." PASION, he says, is about reducing this sort of problem. The project has developed a prototype that runs on a mobile phone and provides information that users can exploit to coordinate their work. It can show information like user availability, or indicators and visualisations that illustrate the social position of a user in the group. It also offers information on user mood. Currently, this works via self-reporting, but soon it will be generated automatically. It can even tell you what the user is doing at a particular moment. "There are, of course, [parts] that could use more work, but we have developed elements of all these systems, and different partners will take them forward in different ways," explains Walker. He returns to the example of sensors that indicate physiological state. Similarly, he says, there are software modules almost ready to deploy in groupware – and that is an area that could be exploited relatively quickly.