We have seen above two kinds of systems: some constructing a synthetic space in which users meet and others providing a virtual space based on a physical environment. The internet foyer [] show how the two paradigms can be combined in a mixed reality allowing one to go ``beyond being there''.
The system tries to unite the concept of a physical foyer with an electronic foyer. A foyer can be considered the public region in some space that informs visitors about what is available in that space and guards access to private regions in the space. A physical foyer is simply a foyer in a physical space (building) while a virtual foyer is a foyer in some electronic space. An example of a virtual foyer is a set of public web pages of an organization, which advertise the information about the organization available on the internet and provide password-protected mechanisms to access this information. The same organization may have both a physical foyer in a building and a virtual foyer in the web, and the internet foyer shows how these concepts can be united.
The system supports three classes of users:
Visitors in the physical foyer see a projected image of the 3-D web space with the locations and images of the users of the virtual-foyer visitors. Visitors in the virtual foyer can also see this space and also a window in the space that shows an image of the physical foyer. They can navigate through this space, zoom in on a node on the space, and select a web node for browsing. When they zoom in on a node, they can see 2-D representations of regular web-users who have opened the node using the modified browser.