How can technology help to nurture relationships between households? This is the question asked by the collaborative project “Together Anywhere, Together Anytime” (TA2).

Many of our enduring experiences, holidays, celebrations and moments of fun and laughter are framed as group, often family, events. Yet modern media and communications serve individuals, not groups. Phones, computers and electronic games devices tend to be individually owned and provide individual experiences. TA2 seeks to explore how technology can support group to group communication.

Social letters will be read by many members of a household; games are often played between families working as teams. Memories in the form of videos and photographs are often shared within families. TA2 wants to enhance and support these processes; enabling people to share their stories, pass digital photos and videos around, add comments to them, and to pass them back. TA2 wants to build systems that allow people to play games with each other, seeing and hearing each other as they laugh with, and at, each other, as they struggle with games like Ludo®, Labyrinth® or Pictionary®. And TA2 also wants to find ways in which modern sensors and IT equipment can give people in one household a better awareness of the activity in another, whilst maintaining every individual's right to privacy.

TA2 media and communication experiences will be characterised by their naturalness; clear relaxed voice communication and intelligently edited video. Through the TA2 system, stories are automatically generated from home-related content, the personal home video or from the antics of a lively game.

Extracted from TA2

You may see the illustration on the right to have an idea of how the system could look like.