CommunityMirrors are large interactive screens (ambient displays) that make content, that usually is hidden in computer systems, visible in public or semi-public spaces. In the Human-Computer-Interaction group at Universität der Bundeswehr München we work on design recommendations for CommunityMirrors and CommunityMirror networks – and operate such CommunityMirror networks for long term evaluation.

The initial ideas for the project date back almost 25 years. During this time, many prototypes were built and used to evaluate design parameters for the application type. With the evaluation in a longer deployment at the Bundeswehr University München (CommunityMirror network), new methods for the 24/7 evaluation of such applications were also created and evaluated.

For the 2025 anniversary, the historical background and various results along the way were summarized in a report, which has been published as Volume 10 in the publication series on socio-technical integration.

For more Information in CommunityMirrors see our publications. German only information can also be found on the public wiki service of the HCI group at https://publicwiki.unibw.de/display/MCI/CommunityMirror.

This video shows how a CommunityMirror application does look like.

See https://communitymirrors.net/use-case-unibw/ for a particular example how the idea of CommunityMirrors has been used to create a particular application at UniBw M.