Presence and IntComm WG

[Candace Holman <>]

Ben Teitelbaum wrote:

> To complement Jeremy's posting, here's another nugget from the New
> York Times.  
>
> The NYT Magazine's annual "Year in Ideas" this week describes work
> from MIT that solves the problem of unwanted interruptions of physical
> meetings in a creative way using geo-location and real-time polling.
> Basically, the people physically proximate to the called party are
> polled quickly as to whether the call should go through.  
>
> That the handling of a two-party call might be influenced by the
> presence of others in the vicinity of the call is not an idea I've
> considered before.  We've talked about room presence (e.g. there is a
> class taking place in this room now), but not the notion that the room
> presence would be determined dynamically by the surrounding people.
>
> Still many technical and social details to flesh out (and I really do
> not know about the blinking squirrel!), but it's an interesting
> notion...
>
>  

Here's some info about Stefan Marti's blinking squirrel:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~stefanm/phd/cellularsquirrel/

Some extremely funny videos, including the parrot precursor to the squirrel:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~stefanm/phd/videos/

Candace

>    The problem is all too familiar: You're chatting with a group of
>    people when someone's cellphone goes off, interrupting the
>    conversation. What makes the intrusion irritating isn't so much
>    the call itself - the caller has no way of knowing if he has
>    chosen a good time to cut in. It's that the group as a whole
>    doesn't have any say in the matter. Until now.
>
>    Stefan Marti, a graduate of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, who now
>    works for Samsung, has devised a system that silently surveys the
>    members of the group about whether accepting an incoming phone
>    call would be appropriate. Then it permits the call to go through
>    only if the group agrees unanimously - thus creating a more
>    consensual sort of interruption.
>
>    more here: 
>    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas1-10.html
>
> -- ben
>
>