One of the increasingly relevant trends in human computer interaction is the movement away from applications based on a narrowly defined cognitive subject toward a richer appreciation of people and their activities in context. Affective computing is one instantiation of this trend and has widened the scope of HCI design and evaluation to include the role of emotions and sensory experiences.

One popular approach to affective computing is the design of applications that monitor and evaluation people's emotions so that applications may adapt appropriately.The success of this approach is determined by how accurately the system senses the 'right' emotions. Another approach looks at how applications evoke emotions, either by exhibiting emotional aspects of by causing reflection on and awareness of emotions. An important distinction of this approach is that we are not attempting to improve on the impoverished model of reason based computing by simply adding emotion algorithms to the equation. Instead we are using computer systems to look at how human emotions define and shape peoples' experiences, and their interpretations of these experiences.

For affective computing to be truly 'affective' it will need to incorporate both these approaches to become an integral component and source of our everyday meaning-making activities. We call this connection to and reflection on emotions, social relationships, and spirituality, affective presence.

To explore this concept of affective presence, we have formed and participate in an international cross-discipline consortium developing an interrelated set of projects. In addition to the HCI Group and the Culturally Embedded Computing Group at Cornell, participants include: Goldsmiths College, UK; the Swedish Institue of Computer Science, Sweden; University of California, Santa Cruz, USA; and the Intel Corporation. As a consortium we are developing devices to trigger the experience of affective presence in a range of environments (e.g. the home, office, public space, and wilderness). As a consortium, we are building joint projects, evaluating one another's designs, and working to develop a coherent theory, methodology, and evaluation strategy for affective presence.

An example projects from the HCI Group that addresses the issue of affect in public spaces is called Miro, a collective visual display designed to represent the emotional climate of an office space. Miro consists of a sound sensing program for measuring activity levels in the space and an 'emotional survey' available at different kiosk stations that asked people to respond to the question, "howare you feeling?". Based on the collective responses to the survey and the sound levels, a large projected animated display (based on a painting by Joan Miro) would change. In evaluations of the experience, we found the most interesting effect of the display was how people would bring their interpretations and prior knowledge of what was happening in the office to their assessment of what the display meant. As people would often collaboratively interpret the display together, they would actively construct a collective sense of the emotional climate in the office. In other words, the system was successful not in modeling or representing the emotional climate, but in encouraging reflection and active interpretation about the emotional climate.