We examined the cross-cultural communication supported by a computational system, using a system, named Silhouettell, which supports real-world encounters. It attracts people by projecting their shadows and promotes conversation by presenting common topics based on each user's profile. Through actual use among people from various countries, we observed and analyzed interactions in the environment in which Silhouettell shows participants' common interests. As a result, we confirmed the following features of cross-cultural communication in the environment. 1. Information directly related to participants, such as their own home pages, plays a helpful role in initiating conversation. 2. In the situation in which it is hard to communicate to each other because of difference of native language, participants may frequently refer to the contents on the screen. We are currently working on the development of a version of the system which explicitly supports cross-cultural encounters, by making use of information about users' cultural backgrounds. We believe that the observations we made of cross-cultural encounters, reported here, will be useful in guiding development of this system.
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