Date: Friday, 1 May 2009 13:00-14:00
Venue: EM G19-20
Name: Prof. Michael Cohen (The University of Aizu, Japan)
We propose a new area of research for multimedia, multi-party conferencing systems, which will allow users to have flexible control during a conferencing, to control media streams and their direction. Controlling the media and the direction from an endpoint has been a challenging issue. For simple example, a user's voice might by default be shared with all others in a chatspace, but an appropriate interface would allow a secret to be shared with some select subset of the members. Our group is exploring interactive multimedia, especially for virtual and mixed reality groupware systems. The apparent paradoxes of multipresence, having avatars in multiple places or spaces simultaneously, are resolvable by an "autofocus" feature, which uses reciprocity, logical exchangeability of source and sink, to project overlaid soundscapes and simulate precedence effect to consolidate the audio display. Current commercially-available conference systems do not generally support such features. Several protocols have been proposed for VoIP session control; H.323 and SIP are the most significant. SIP, the Session Initiation Protocol, is a signalling protocol for internet conferencing, telephony, presence applications, event notification, and instant messaging. In our research, we deploy the concept of narrowcasting, a technique for limiting information streams, using SIP to negotiate the device capabilities for establishing, modifying, and terminating sessions. We conclude by describing applications of this metaphor to a music browser, extending "Music in Wonderland."