TELEPRESENCE NEWS #11

by Barbara Whitmer

October 6, 1993

1. Luca Giachino, our charming visitor from CEFRIEL, has returned to Milano, Ita ly as of September 17th. He may be reached at: giachino@mailer.cefriel.it. His a ddress is: CEFRIEL - Via Emanueli, 15 - 20126, Milano - Italy. A summary of his work performed while visiting with us follows: Activity Sensing Through Portholes Images: A Bridge Between Passive Awareness and Active Awareness Luca Giachino

In order to detect the presence of human activity using "Portholes" imag es, I wrote a software module, called CmpFrames, that compares two consecutive frames of a scene to guess if there has been some significant change (ie: someone entering of leav ing the scene). CmpFrames has been designed to operate quickly at the cost of ce rtain assumptions about the scene (for instance, it assumes a non-changing backg round). CmpFrames is the fundamental brick upon which I created a personal notif ication tool, called Monitor, that provides notifications of people's presence a nd availability. It has been mainly written for testing the CmpFrames module, bu t it turned out to be an interesting personal notification tool, and it is av ailable to everybody. At the Ottawa Engineering Group they successfully integr ated the CmpFrames module into the Xerox Portholes code.

2. ECSCW'93 was held in Milan, Italy September 13-17. Hiroshi Ishii presented a co-authored paper: Hiroshi Ishii, Kazuho Arita and Takashi Yagi, "Beyond Videoph ones: TeamWorkStation for Narrowband ISDN,"Proceedings of ECSCW '93, Kluwer Acad emic Publishers, Dordrecht, Netherlands, September 1993, pp.325-340.

3. It was a busy week of Sept. 13th with the preparation of CHI'94 paper submiss ions. A total of seven papers submitted by the Telepresence group to this presti gious conference. Garry Beirne has stored electronic versions of the papers subm itted in a directory under /telepresence for industry and academic researchers t o access.

4. Telepresence hosted several visitors and staged several demos in September:

• Sept. 02 Alias Research
• Sept. 15 Arnott Design Group & guests
• Sept. 21 Intel Corp.
• Sept. 22 Arnott Design Group & guests
• Sept. 22 Wales Minister of State (ITRC)
• Sept. 23 Arnott Design Group & guests
• Sept. 30 Alias Research
• Sept. 30 Voice-mail Server Jingping Xie

  We have prototyped a novel application which provides a bridge between the world s of voice mail and e-mail. It works like this:

  - Voice mail messages left on a special phone number in Ottawa will be digitized and then routed through the INTERNET so that the messages will appear as a specially tagged e-mail message. Using a PC, these messages can be read as any other e-mail message except that instead of listing text, the mailer plays t he message over the PC's speaker. - Messages can be sent back to the voice serve r (for another subscriber) by "replying" to the incoming message and then speaking into the PC's microphone . The message travels over the INTERNET and gets stored in the Ottawa voice serv er for phone play-back or PC play-back as the case may be.

  The following paragraphs provide details on how to try the new service. If you a re not interested in details, skip to the next item.

  The telephone number for accessing the voice mail server is (613) 820-9211 if yo u dial from outside the OEG lab. The numbers are 128, 129, and 133 if you dial f rom inside the OEG lab. When you get through the line, you will be prompted with some guiding messages. To leave a message for a subscriber of this service (cur rently all the staff in the OEG lab), you need to know the mail box number of th at person (currently the local phone extension number). When a message is initia ted, according to the recipient's configuration, the server will either send the whole message in the encoded MIME format (for an E-mail Client who has a MIME c ompliant mail reader) or send only a notification message through E-mail (for XC lient configuration). The E-mail client configuration will enable you to retriev e your voice mail directly from your mail reader (if it is MIME compliant), whil e the XClient configuration will enable you to retrieve your mail from either th e telephone or a customized tool (currently better stick to the phone).

  Another convenient way to initiate a voice message is through a mail reader. Thi s can be done now through a modified Elm mail reader already installed in the OE G lab. You can create and send a MIME message by typing "M" and you can reply to a message with a MIME message by typing "R" from your Elm interface. If you wan t your out-going message to be processed by the voice mail server, then set the environment variable OEG_SERVER_ADDR to the E-mail address of the local voice ma il server, currently vmuser@michele if you are inside the OEG lab or vmuser@mich ele.oeg.carleton.ca if you are outside the OEG lab. This will ensure that the me ssage can also be retrieved through telephone if necessary.

  The following is a list of subscribers and their mail box numbers

  karam ross passier dominic xie maciek bruce 126 124 112 111 131 115 121

  If anyone wants to use this service or the modified Elm reader (which is capable of initiating and receiving MIME-format e-mail) please contact Jingping Xie . It currently only works on UNIX platforms.

  8. The talks for the Telepresence Seminar Series have been set up for the fall. An announcement with title and abstract will be distributed electronically the w eek prior to the session. All talks are held on Mondays from 10:00 am to 11:00 a m in Sandford Fleming 2103 at the University of Toronto and at the OEG on Queens view Ave in Ottawa.

  • Oct. 04 Beverly Harrison
  • Oct. 18 Bill Buxton
  • Oct. 25 Andrew Clement
  • Nov. 01 Ron Riesenbach & Christine Sue-Chan
  • Nov. 08 Jingping Xie
  • Nov. 15 Jeremy Cooperstock
  • Nov. 22 Marilyn Mantei
  • Nov. 29 Chris Passier
  • Dec. 06 Tracy Narine

  9. A workshop on The User Interface Design Process by Marilyn Mantei will be giv en November 25-16, 1993 at the Four Seasons-Inn on the Park, 1100 Eglinton Avenu e East, Toronto, ONT M3C 1H8 (ph: 416-444-2561). This workshop is sponsored by t he Information Technology Research Centre. For more information please contact R osanna Reid or 416-978-8558.

  10. There is a "Vis-A-Vis" bulletin board being run by WorldLinx. If you would l ike to learn more about Vis-A-Vis, the dial-up modem number is 416 890 3624. mod em setting is 8-N-1.

  11. The French-trained gourmet chef, Marilyn Mantei, invites you to enjoy cassis cocktails, a yuletide log and other assorted delights at the Telepresence Holid ay party on December 22nd at 5:00 pm at her home in downtown Toronto. Partygoers are encouraged to bring a beverage and a Telepresence-related homemade tree orn ament! Details will be distributed in the November Telepresence Newsletter. Mark your calendars -- you don't want to miss this one. explorer>

  ---

  Back to Telepresence News Back to tp Home page