What is Astra?

Objective

The project shall investigate awareness systems and services for social purposes (e.g., to help geographically separated but closely related people to stay in touch). The aim of the project is to:

• Provide a proof of concept for an awareness service, connecting a homebound to a mobile user
• Verify the appropriateness of mediated social presence as a phenomenon for characterising long term and low-pace asynchronous communication activities
• Verify that user social needs can be served by this class of systems to complement existing means of communication.

The latter is the success criterion for the project. Up to now, the usefulness and value of such systems to people has only been hypothesised. The project success amounts to providing concrete evidence of people seeing value in awareness services and wanting to adopt them.