The Future of the Body in Tomorrow'sWorkplace

Even in the most hectic or time-conscious workplace, employees gather in person to chat. And even in the most networked workplace, employees still make time for face-to-face collaboration. This isn't surprising ifwe consider that the ability and desire to engage in face-to-face communication (using eye gaze to manage turn-taking, head nods to indicate listening, and smiles to indicate attention) starts soon after birth - well before infants even learn to talk. We might say that we are built to communicate face-to-face! But what role will embodied interaction play in the future workplace, when we will be interacting with autonomous robots, engaging with other people through presence robots, and working in a virtual world where we and our colleagues are represented by avatars? In this talk I will describe some of the ways that embodied interaction is likely to change in the future, and some of the ways that we need to take those future scenarios into account as we design and implement multimodal interfaces.