Rich Presence Demonstration

A project of the Internet2 Presence and Integrated Communications (PIC) Working Group.

Large View (PDF | PNG | DIA)

Contents

Quick Links

Overview

This demonstration is participatory, distributed, and experimental. Participants download and install one of several integrated communications clients on their laptops. These clients allow participants to initiate voice, instant messaging, and video calls to each other using the receiver's email address as a single, converged electronic identity.

Communication is enhanced through the inclusion of rich presence services, through which participants may see not only who is on-line, but also where they are and what they are doing. As participants connect to the wireless LAN, their location and calendar presence is updated automatically. Room location is derived through triangulation of 802.11 signals and is cross-referenced with the meeting calendar to learn the name and duration of the session in that room at that time.

Users may also experience placing SIP voice calls to any user at a SIP.edu-enabled institution and may eavesdrop on any member meeting session by initiating voice communication to a "room buddy".

What to Expect

Expect nothing and be pleasantly surprised! This demonstration is complex and experimental. You will have to configure software on your laptop. Voice quality over the wireless LAN may be poor. The WiFi signal triangulation may be inaccurate. Some or all components may fail.

Some or all components may also function well! If successful, this demonstration will showcase a number of emerging technologies, including:

We hope that this demonstration will also provoke thoughtful discussion on a number of important issues facing campus telecommunications leaders, including:

This is more experiment than demonstration. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to deploy rich presence with automatic location services in a large scale conference. This is also the first Internet2 meeting to use phased array WiFi "switching" and the first to encourage attendees to use the WiFi meeting network for voice.

Special Note on Privacy

There are two elements of this demonstration that may raise privacy concerns.

First, the network infrastructure is monitoring the physical location of each participant and publishing it. Physical location is only monitored for demo participants and only published to fellow demo participants. Furthermore, the presence portal may be used to disable the publication of physical presence or to override manually what is published.

The second aspect of this demo that may raise privacy concerns is that session rooms are "bugged" with IP speakerphones, allowing anonymous evesdroppers to listen in. These phones are placed near the podium and are marked clearly with signs indicating that they are live. Anyone who wishes to speak privately in a session room should mute the speakerphone.

Getting Started

Register Yourself

Your first step is to register yourself for participation. Completing the registration process will provision you as a user on our SIP server and add you to a temporary mailing list for demo participants.

You will be asked to provide your email address. Please use the email address that your colleagues would normally use to reach you, because that is how others will initiate voice, IM, and video communication with you during the course of this demo.

You will also be asked to provide a password. This is used to prevent abuse (e.g. by spammers) and is not intended to deliver a high level of security. The passwords submitted will be stored in plain text in our registration database and may be transmitted in the clear. Please do not use a password that should not be compromised.

Register yourself

Get a Headset

You may purchase a Cyber Acoustics CA-200 headset for use with this demo at a cost of US$7.25. These will be branded with "pic.internet2.edu" to point rubberneckers in the right direction. And, there will be rubberneckers, since what you will be doing with your new headset is w4y c00l!

Alternatively, you may use your own headset. We do not recommend using your laptop's built-in microphone and speakers, as they are often of poor quality and, without acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) software, will cause serious echo problems.

Purchase a Headset

If you puchase a headset, you may pick it up at the help desk on the second floor of the meeting hotel (Indianapolis Marriott) beginning Tuesday, October 14th.

Download a User Agent (UA)

We are supporting two SIP user agents. Please download one of these now.

Configuring SIPC

Getting started

If you have not yet downloaded a copy of SIPC, please do so now. Save this executable to a location of your choosing, and then run it. Choose the defaults throughout the install process.

The SIP address you will be using during the demo is the email address you used to register for participation in the rich presence demo

Setup

  1. Start SIPC. If a pop-up window appears demanding "Please input your license key", use the key sipc:-:2003-11-17:2003-11-17:f56f5cdb3b4b7de453b9549e2f185078
  2. When you start the SIPC program, you will see the Preferences dialog box appear (see figure 1)
    1. Populate the Name, SIP address, and Email fields using your information
    2. Populate the Outbound Server using the address of our SIP server (ser.uits.indiana.edu)
    3. Select OK
  3. The main screen is now shown (see figure 2)
    1. Select the black button on the upper-left corner
    2. Select Accounts / add new account
    3. The fields here should be pre-populated with the information needed (see figure 3)
    4. Your password is what you selected during the registration process
    5. Select OK
    6. You should now be prompted for your user credentials again
    7. Log in and press OK
  4. At the main screen (see figure 2), your contact list is on the left
    1. Select the "+" button to add a contact
    2. Add the Name that you want shown in your list
    3. Add the SIP address (i.e. email address) of the contact
    4. Add the name of the group you want this contact in
    5. If no group is created, type a name to create a new one
    6. Select OK

More information on SIPC

For more information on using SIPC, see the user's manual.

View the SIPC User's Manual


Figure 1 - SIPC preferences dialog box


Figure 2 - SIPC main screen



Figure 3 - SIPC "Add a new account" dialog box



Figure 4 - SIPC "Add a new contact" dialog box


Configuring Session

Background

Session is a software-only product from wave3software. It is a SIP User Agent (UA) that runs on several versions of Microsoft Windows Operating System and Apple's Mac OSX.

In the context of this demonstration, Session will register with a SIP proxy server, which was set up specifically for this demo and which runs SIP Express Router (SER) from iptel.org.

Getting Started

If you have not already downloaded the Session software, please take a few minutes to do so now.

Once you've downloaded one of the Session installer images above, proceed with the installation by executing the installer program. This version of Session has been specially built for our demo. You can accept most of the default options provided during the install process with one exception. You must enter a specific serial number on the customer information screen. See figure 5 for an example of this screen and the actual serial number that each client should use.

Start the Session client after the installation program completes. At this point Session will attempt to run a preferences wizard. Cancel out of this wizard. Follow the instructions in the next section to complete the setup.

Setup

  1. Start the Session client and wait for the main application screen to be displayed. A sample main screen is shown in figure 6.
  2. Set outbound proxy to ser.uits.indiana.edu. See figure 7 for an example.
    1. Select Edit from the main menu toolbar
    2. Go to the Preferences dialog window
    3. Select the Calls tab
    4. Set the proxy name to ser.uits.indiana.edu
    5. Select Apply then OK
  3. Next register your Session UA with the SIP proxy server. See figure 8 for an example.
    1. Select Edit > Accounts from the main menu toolbar
    2. Select the SIP tab
    3. Select the Add button
    4. Enter the server name "PIC WG"
    5. Enter the server address (right-hand side of your email address)
    6. Leave the Realm field blank
    7. Enter your username (left-hand side of your email address)
    8. Enter the password you selected during the registration process
    9. Select OK. This will cause Session to send a REGISTER message

Pre-Populating Room Contacts

Download SessionContacts.xml and place it in /Documents and Settings/<username>/ on Windows or <home folder> (e.g. /users/<username>/) on Mac OS X. This will pre-populate Session's user list as shown in figure 10. If it replaces an existing file, any contact info in the existing file will be lost.

More Information on Session

For more information on Session, refer to the Help pulldown or you may reference the User Guide that is included during installation. The User Guide may be found at the following locations:

Windows 2000/XP:
\Program Files\Session\docs\Client_Userguide.pdf
Mac OS X:
\Applications\Session\Client_Userguide.pdf

Figure 5 - Session install window


Figure 6 - Session main menu



Figure 7 - Setting the outbound proxy server address for Session



Figure 8 - Defining the registration parameters for Session



Figure 9 - Creating a new contact in Session



Figure 10 - Session's user list


Experiencing the Demo

This is a "first light" demonstration of integrated communications, meaning that some of the elements are being taken out of the research lab for the first time. As such, in a Confucian sense, we expect this to be an interesting time.

One of the most exciting aspects for the demonstration developers is the opportunity for "paths-in-the-snow" learning. (Where do you put your sidewalks? Wait until it snows and see where people want to walk.) Please join us in exploring what integrated communications should look like. We value your feedback very much!

There are many elements to this demonstration. Below we highlight some of the major components. Please exercise the demonstration and let us know what you think on the participant's mailing list. If you need some more help, please stop by the conference help desk.

Rich Presence

Presence has been defined as the "notification of events that facilitate communications" - Henning Schulzrinne. Rich Presence (RP) extends this basic notion to the fuller sense of context-aware communication. Automated Location Services (ALS) takes advantage of information the network has to locate a user geographically. In combination, interesting possibilities arise.

For example, this demonstration is aware of the conference calendar. If you are in a track session room during a presentation, your presence agent will automatically publish that you are in a meeting and inbound voice calls should not be made to you until the meeting ends. It will further suggest that instant messaging (IM) would be appropriate.

If you leave a room, the ALS software will notice your movement and cause your presence information to change. It will track you as you move within the conference space and publish your location appropriately. Should you move to a hallway, your presence agent will also change your published information now to welcome calls. Notice that one value of the RP/ALS combination is finding a colleague at the conference is no longer an endless game of tag.

Voice over WiFi

The communications software in your laptop will work whether you are connected via wire or over the WiFi network. Clipping the tether inevitably invokes many of the same issues that have been raised with cellular telephones. The value of mobility is juxtaposed with the possibility of some deterioration in call quality and reliability. One of the promises of integrating communications is that communications participants will be able to switch media nearly seamlessly. Should your IM exchange become too complicated for the medium, just switch to voice. Or perhaps the reverse might be wanted should a voice call become unreliable. The participants would be able to switch quickly and easily to IM.

SIP.edu Addressing

Many people have noted that computer-mediated communication (C-MC) over the Internet permits the opportunity to drop "telephone number" addressing in favor of a more people-friendly method. The Internet2 SIP.edu initiative uses email addresses as a one-stop electronic address that can be used for all forms of integrated communications. For example, if Jane's email address is email:jane.doe@bigu.edu. then her voice address would become sip:jane.doe@bigu.edu. For this demonstration we have modified the SIP server software to permit you to use your email address (the one you with which you registered yourself) as your voice and IM address.

You may also use your soft client to place voice calls to any SIP.edu address, regardless of whether the recipient is present in Indianapolis. For example, you can call anyone with a yale.edu or mit.edu email address.

Room Buddies

One last feature we've built into the demonstration is the notion of a "room buddy." Each of the track session rooms will be connected to an audio conference on Internet2's eDial conference server. For example, to listen in on the session taking place in Marriott Ballroom, 1, simply place a call to ballroom_1@ser.uits.indiana.edu. An interesting side effect of this approach is that you'll be able to converse will other audio conference participants without disturbing the presenter or physical attendees.

Presence Portal

A participant will be able to see the automatically updated and published presence information for all participants at a web portal. This portal will also feature click-to-dial in which a particpant can initiate a voice call by clicking on a participant. Additionally, participant's will be able to set their presence information manually from this page.

Visit the Presence Portal

Where to Find More Help

Members of the PIC working group will be staffing a help desk for this demo. The demo help desk is co-located with the main help desk in the hallway outside the Marriott Ballroom on the second level.

Participants are encouraged to use the pic-demo@internet2.edu mailing list. Every registered participant in the demo has been automatically added to this temporary listserv.

Post a Question to the pic-demo Mailing List

View the pic-demo Mail Archive

FAQ

  1. How did you do this?

    If you are interested in digging deeper into the architecture, standards, and technology behind this demonstration, visit our demo implementors page, rummage through the PIC working group mail archives, or come to the PIC working group meeting.

  2. Will there be a session in Indianapolis where this demo is discussed?

    Yes! On Tuesday October 14 (7:00 PM - 8:30 PM EST, Marriott Ballroom 2), the PIC working group will meet to discuss the demo, answer questions, and begin planning to develop the demo for a reprise in the Spring.

  3. I'm having trouble unpacking Session for Mac OS X. What's wrong?

    Make sure that when your browser saves the download, it associates the correct application (VISE Installer) with the file. For a step-by-step walk through of the Mac OS X installation process, see Jeff King's helpful note

  4. .