The Personal Presence System: A wide-area network resource for the real-time composition of multipoint multimedia communications

The Personal Presence System (PPS) is an experimental research prototype platform to support advanced broadband applications, including multimedia conferencing and distance learning. It supports the user's presentation control of advanced network elements (multimedia bridges). The multimedia bridge provides for a single contact point per user, who receives only one combined video stream, which minimizes access bandwidth. This architecture solves the N-squared transmission problem of multipoint video conferencing and makes customer terminal equipment simpler and cheaper than high-end desktop workstations. The PPS provides each user with flexible presentation control of a feature-rich video bridge. The PPS also supports advanced features such as object extraction and multimedia object associations.