About

Hexagon logo

Hexagon was a presence tool adding the dimension of video. People could all see each other sitting at their desks in hexagons. Videos could of course be turned off by participants as required.  

Benefits: 

  • Produces a powerful ‘team-building’ video ‘presence’ 
  • Creates a ‘live map’ of a dispersed community 
  • Includes both text & voice communication 

Features: 

  • Comprehensive text chat room. Send your message to an individual or to ‘all’ of the people present. Includes visual and audible indicators for new messages, plus many more features. 
  • HexMail – send a message to a registered user not currently in the room and they will see it the next time they enter the room. 
  • If you need to speak to someone, they are just a click away! Hexagon includes private easy to use voice chat between two people.
  • The preferences section lets you personalise many aspects of Hexagon to your own requirements.
Hexagon Interface with staff having an online group chat

Using only the universal Adobe Flash plug-in running in a standard web browser window, you can keep in touch with colleagues wherever you are in the world, with this secure and private application. 

For example, get an immediate response from a colleague to a ‘quick’ question using the inbuilt text or voice chat and most importantly actually see them while you are doing so! 
A picture can tell you so much… Do they look too busy to contact? Do they have visitors? Are they on the phone? Or just temporarily away? 

Whether you are working at home for the day, or away at a conference for a while, you can still feel part of the team. Remote working is not so remote anymore! You could even consider positioning a few cameras around your workplace to monitor areas like the front door (who is that visitor?), photocopier room (is it free?), or coffee area (has a new pot just been made?!). 

Publications:

Scott, Peter; Quick, Kevin; Tomadaki, Eleftheria and Linney, Jon (2006). Ambient video awareness: “It’s great, but I still don’t want it”. In: Innovative Approaches for Learning and Knowledge Sharing, EC-TEL 2006 Workshops Proceedings, 1-2 Oct 2006, Greece. view in ORO