Rich Presence Demonstration

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

Large View (PDF | PNG | DIA **Need to make**)

Contents

Quick Links

Overview

This demonstration is participatory, distributed, and experimental. Participants download and install a specially tuned integrated communications client on their laptops. This client 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 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. We will also be gathering aggregate, but not individual, usage information for the purposes of evaluating the preformance of various aspects of the demo and planning for future demonstrations. 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 some session rooms are "bugged" allowing anonymous evesdroppers to listen in. IP phones are connected to the room microphone systems and the output is available as part of the demo for people to listien to. Anyone who wishes to speak privately not use these rooms.

Getting Started

Registration

All pre-registred attendees have been also enabled for participation in this demo. This means you have been provisioned as a user on our SIP server and added to a temporary mailing list for demo participants. If you are walk-in registrant than there may be delay before can actively participate in the demo. ** HOW ARE WE GOING TO HANDLE WALK-INs? **

Although everyone has been enabled, participation in the demonstration is voluntary. You chose to join in by registrering with the PIC sip server (most easily done using the pre-configured SIPC client described below.) By registering, you are implying your acknowledgement and consent to the operating conditions of the demo which endeavor to faclitate communications between and location tracking of participants. If you do not chose do register with the PIC sip server, then then information about you and your location will NOT be made available nor will demo participants be communicating with you through the demo services.

Your account name for the purposes of this demonstration is the email address you provided on your Joint Tech's meeting registration form. Hopefully this is an 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.

For convenience all demonstration accounts have been preconfigured with a common password which built into the SIPC client provided for the demo. This is intended to provide minmimal protection against abuse (e.g. by spammers)but is not intended to deliver a high level of security. If you want you can set a new password for yourself using an option on the Presence Portal. If you chose to set a new password please note that the passwords submitted will be stored in plain text in our registration database and may be transmitted in the clear. Do not use a password that should not be compromised.

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 will can pick it up from any of the PIC WG members at the meeting.

Download a User Agent (UA)

For this demonstration we are encouraging the use of a customized version of the SIPC user agent. Please download it now. You can try using other SIP user agents but you will not experience many of the advanced elememts of the rich presence environment that we are featuring at this meeting.