Web Page Centered Communication System Based on a Physical Property

We have developed a novel communication system that enables ALL users to share information and emotion effectively through ALL Web pages based on a physical property: a user can perceive others browsing the same pages through avatars on the Web browser, like a face to face communication in real world. The system optimize the displayed and communicable users by the relationship among them based on the information searching and sharing activities. Furthermore, the system also enables users to search not only Web pages but appropriate users: we construct a new ranking model by combining the real space information (the user activities) with the Web space information (the hyperlinks). We also verify the effectiveness of the system by the user study experiments in the condition where we suppose the system works especially well, i.e., information retrieval, collaboration tasks, and sharing of feelings.