Jasper van de Ven, Falko Schmid, Tobias Hesselmann, Susanne Boll,
Social relationships between spatially separated groups can be difficult to establish and maintain. Meetings and talks are often reduced to a minimum because of the spatial distance between the involved groups. Our approach to solve this is to interconnect separated groups using a network of multi-modal displays, which are able to detect and represent social activities at the respective other site. To comprehensively represent and interpret social activities in those display environments and establish a communication channel between them, a highly flexible and dynamic software architecture is needed. As a solution, we have developed a framework for interaction and communication in spatially distributed social groups, which is described in this paper. We present the concept, the actual architecture and a prototypical implementation of the system.