Telempathy

This article introduces telempathy, a complementary form of telecommunicati ons in which the presence and activity of remote people is presented using ambient displays. This paper focuses on the 'awareness' of people's activit ies as a precursor to more conventional forms of telecommunications. Initia l research is described in which a framework for software agents is used to gather real-time availability information, displayed using visual and audi tory interfaces on networked wearable computers. The potential market for t elempathy services is discussed. It is believed that such services will pro mote telephony usage in a variety of commercial and residential application s.