Exploring Passive Social Wearables with Gossip is a paper written by Eric Gilbert, Matthew Yapchaian and Karrie Karahalios for the CHI2007 workshop "Shared Encounters". The application they describe is a wearable speech interface that take advantage of gossips and display them as a "social awareness":

"People gossip constantly: at the office, over the fence, within families and at happy hour. Consequently, gossip is the spoken script for most face-to-face encounters. (...) Our system, known as Gossip, reacts to users’ everyday talk by displaying a word from the conversation on the wearer’s clothing. We present our system concept and a specific case study involving low-fidelity prototyping sessions. "

They did a wizard-of-oz study to see, some of the verbalizations from the users:

"“I thought they would be distracting, but they weren't. It was funny seeing words that had come up in our conversation.” (...) “It gave me an idea of what I was talking about! Even when I wasn't going to focus on a special subject those words reminded me to get back to that subject.”"

Why do I blog this? reminds me of a project carried out by researchers at the lab I worked previously: Reflect is a noise-sensitive table that displays turn-taking patterns when students work collaboratively (a peripheral perception of the group verbal interaction or on individual contributions represented as lights). Both projects aims at augmenting interactions: the former with semantics, the latter with occurrences of talk.