Mesh Mobs: Virtually augmented crowds

We report on a six-week research project on the topic of crowd computer interaction, which was conducted at ITU in October/November 2011 while the first author was resident as a visiting professor. The project led to a proposal for mesh mobs, a new type of smart crowd, in which physically collocated people interact via their WiFi-enabled mobile phones. The paper provides a brief background to crowd computer interaction, motivates the concept of mesh mob and presents some design and implementation issues pertaining to applications for mesh mobs