In this paper, we propose a chat system called “Kairos Chat” that supports multiple time flows with different flow rates. In face-to-face conversations, people often make digressive remarks that are unrelated to the main topic of discussion in order to facilitate smooth discussions. At the same time, by rapidly forgetting these digressive remarks, they naturally refine their memory of the discussion. This can be seen as a result of people subjectively perceiving each remark on different time flows based on its content.
However, in conventional chat systems, all remarks are treated on a single time flow, resulting in a mixture of digressive remarks in the discussion history and a lack of refinement. Therefore, in Kairos Chat, we aim to achieve both ease of making digressive remarks and natural refinement of the conversation history by allowing each remark to be treated on different time flows based on its content.
The results of the user experiments showed that users naturally utilized the difference in flow rates to make digressive remarks more casually, and partial refinement of the conversation history was achieved. Additionally, an investigation was conducted on the relationship between each time flow and the conversation threads, revealing that 40% of the adjacent pairs in the conversation threads span different time flows.
There was a similar idea proposed on /collab. It’s worth noting that the term used here is “time flow” instead of “time axis”.
