Preliminary results on a large-scale cyber-physical hybrid discussion support experiment

Abstract

This paper presents a preliminary experimental result on a large-scale experiment on a cyber-physical hybrid discussion support environment in a panel discussion session in an international conference. Our research group has been studying supporting technologies for online large-scale discussions. Online large-scale discussion has been focused as a new methodology that enable people to discuss, argue, and make consensus in terms of political issues, social complex problems (like Climate Change), city planning, and so on. In several cases, we found that online discussions are very effective to gather people opinions and discussions so far. Moreover, in this paper, we propose a hybrid (cyber-physical) environment in which people can discuss online and also offline simultaneously. We conducted a large-scale experiment in a panel discussion session in an international conference where participants can discuss by using our online discussion support system and by physical communications as usual. We analyzed the obtained date from the following three viewpoints: Participants' cyber-physical attention, Keywords cyber-physical linkage, and Cyber-physical discussion flow. These three viewpoints indicate our methodology can be effective to support hybrid large-scale discussions.