Jabberwocky is a freely available mobile phone application designed to promote urban community connections and a sense of familiarity, anxiety, and play in public urban places. It takes advantage of current Bluetooth device proliferation. The application does not require seeding the population with initial users of the social network to function. Even today in most urban cities, the existence of even the current Bluetooth mobile phone is enough to gather meaningful and useful data for visualizations of place and urban strangers.

Please check the Official Familiar Stranger Research project website for the most complete information on the motivation of this urban application.

Jabberwocky was developed by members of the Urban Atmospheres group within Intel Research Berkeley-Eric Paulos with Elizabeth Goodman. The project was primarily an out growth of several months of studies and research on the concept of our urban Familiar Strangers. All of the materials and research artifacts from this project at the Official Familiar Strangers Research website.

Eric Paulos is a Research Scientist at Intel in Berkeley, California where he leads the Urban Atmospheres project - challenged to use provocative methods to understand the future fabric of our emerging digital and wireless urban landscape. Eric also directs the Experimental Interaction Unit (www.eiu.org) which produces physical devices designed to explore the interaction dilemmas between humans and technology. Eric received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley where he researched scientific, and social issues surrounding internet based telepresence, robotics, and mediated communication tools. Eric has developed several internet based tele-operated robots including, Mechanical Gaze in 1995 and Personal Roving Presence devices (PRoPs) such as Space Browsing helium filled tele-operated blimps and ground based PRoP systems (1995-2000) (www.prop.org).