Augmented group presence in PASION project: Presentation of a first applications developer prototype.

PASION is a European project aimed at supporting mediated interaction of large networks of people and augmenting their communication with the provision of group presence cues. These cues consist of indices of the group’s activity, self-reported data and physiological information that will be presented to players, and they will improve the group presence. This is the main contribution of PASION. In this paper we present a first applications developer prototype and the first hunting game created with it, Bluenet. Bluenet supports a collaborative activity, treasure hunting, distributed across the large space of a city and mediated by mobile phones (later PDAs, etc.). As such it can be used for applications in which group cooperation must be improved, with the additional advantage of making the degree of cooperation immediately visible as feedback during the game.