Multimedia information associations in the Personal Presence System

In future public intelligent network architectures it will be important for a network service to allow users to customize and control the multimedia information they receive. One powerful presentation control capability is to allow users to 'associate' multimedia streams together in unique, customized ways. Associating media streams with each other allows a user to create what might be thought of as composite or meta multimedia object. This mechanism can be used to synchronize the delivery of different multimedia streams in order to achieve some presentation goal. A multimedia provider may want to synchronize information from different servers, as the provider may not have the capacity to store all the necessary information, or may not have the copyright to certain information. A user may also want to associate different video images together in order to compose a video scene. This might be used to associate the images being sent by an array of cameras to give a panoramic view, or to enable a user to group other users of a teleconference. The teleconferencing user could then view a subset of the other conferees and have a convenient way to access different conferees' images by simply panning left or right on the combined video scene. Users could also be grouped together by role for easy access.