Presence Technology: Accessing Live Multimedia Information Systems

This paper introduces tile Presence Technology (PT) a technology targeted to the needs of people who want to be part of a remote, live environment. Presence Technology blends component technologies like computer vision, signal understanding, heterogeneous sensor fusion, live-media delivery, telepresence and multimedia information systems into a novel set of functionality that enables the user to perceive, move around, enquire about, and interact with the remote, live environment through her reception and control devices. PT creates the opportunity to perform different tasks: watch an event, tour and explore a location, meet and communicate with others, monitor the environment for a potential situation, perform a query on the perceived objects and events, and recreate past observations. Technically, the framework (Figure 1) offers computer-mediated access to multi-sensory information in an environment, integrates the sensory information into a situation model of the environment, and delivers, at the user's request, the relevant part of the assimilated information through a muttimodat interface.