A network services interface for telepresence applications

Telepresence is the application of computing and telecommunications to support a sense of social proximity among distant collaborators. These applications use a variety of multimedia communications and presentation techniques to achieve these goals. Paramount in these applications is the need to provide distributed control, and to some extent distributed information exchange. A network services interface (NSI) has been developed to provide the control and data exchange backplane for telepresence applications. Two case studies illustrate its use: a re-implementation of the Xerox Portholes concept that shows the ability of NSI to support existing applications by simple means; and an implementation of a generic conference control system and its instantiation to manage multiple conference rooms