Cafes and online world both function welll as public gathering place.

But while online conversation with strangers is quite common, in the real world such encounters are less usual. Another difference is that oline, one is fundamentally alone, many others virtually present, but one’s sense of their presence is minimal. In cafes, the number of people is fewer, but their presence is far greater.

The Chit Chat Club , a MIT project by Karrie Karahalios and Judith Donath wants to study how these two worlds can mix. It is a real cafe, with real tables, and pastries. Yet the customers seated round the tables may be present physically or via avatars, equipped with monitors and network connections.

Virtual chatters can enter the cafe through the website and occupy an avatar chair. This opens a real-time audio and graphical connection between the physical space and the online participant, where the virtual partecipant can communicate by talking or typing and can change their avatar’s expression to surprised, happy, angry or sad.

On the avatar chair, the monitor is at ordinary head height at the table and the face in it is human scale. The chest area of the avatar chair houses a screen to display text that an online user types in.

A camera on the avatar’s head allows the remote visitor to see others at the table.

While connected, remote visitors can communicate.

The virtual visit allows for a person in the physical Chit Chat Club to also occupy an avatar chair at another table. Thus, people at the Club do not know if the person behind the avatar sitting at their table is a remote visitor, or one of their fellow patrons from across the room.