Presence 3.
1. What Does It Do? — A Short Description
Presence is a tool that allows you to track the visitors of your places.
Not only does it give you the names of your visitors and the dates of their
visit, but it also presents you the data as sophisticated statistics in
a variety of charts. The charts show
- the list of names of the visitors along with when they arrived and left,
as well as the visit duration,
- the list of all unique visitors along with the number of total visits
and the total duration of all visits,
- the number of visitors per day of a particular month,
- the number of visitors per hour of a particular day,
- the average number of visitors per day of week (i.e. how many visitors
there were on Sundays, for instance, throughout the entire time of
operation of Presence),
- the average number of visitors per hour of day,
- the number of simultaneous visitors,
- total times of you visitors per day/week/month
- traffic (avatar minutes during the last 24 hours),
- histogram for how many visitors stayed for how long, and
- the languages spoken by visitors.
This data is presented on a web page, the Presence statistics page, as shown above.
Presence consists of a set of sensors you can set up at the locations you
want to monitor. The sensors have copy permissions, so you can set up as many of
them as you want.
The Sensors can send messages to a list of people to notify them
when someone arrives or leaves.
Sensors come as one-prim spheres, but the scripts are copyable, so you can
place it in any other object of your liking that will then act as a Presence
sensor.
Note: Presence 3 is based on Google Docs: all the visitor data will be logged to Google Docs spreadsheets.
In order to use the device, a Google (Docs) account is required.
2. Setup
2.1 Setting up the Google Spreadsheet
This section explains how to set up the Google form and spreadsheet, which will be used to store the data gathered by the sensors.
One spreadsheet can be used to store the data of multiple sensors.
So typically, you have to do this once, but you can create multiple spread sheets if you want to rez many sensors and group them in individual spreadsheets.
Please follow these instructions carefully.
- In order to use the Presence system, you'll need a GoogleDocs / Google Drive account.
Go to https://docs.google.com and log in or create a new account if you don't have one.
- Once you're logged in, open the (CTS) Presence Form Template by clicking this link.
- A new page will open showing the form template. Click the Use this template button.
- After clicking, you'll see the actual spreadsheet. Rename it if you like by clicking the title ("Copy of Presence-Visitors") and entering a new one.
- You may want to adjust the timezone of your spreadsheet. By default, it is set to your local timezone. To change that (e.g., if you want to
collect the data in SLT), go to File, then click on Spreadsheet settings.... If you want to change the timezone to SLT, select
(GMT-08:00) Pacific Time in the Time Zone field.
- Next, you need to share your sheet so that the Presence page can access it.
To do that, click the blue Share button in the top right corner, then click Get shareable link in the dialog window that opened.
Click Copy link.
- Now, in another browser window/tab, open your Presence statistics page by clicking this link.
For your convenience, bookmark it so you have easier access to it.
This is the page on which you'll see all your visitor statistics data.
In the Manage Keys section, click Add new key.
Type a key name in the Key Name field, e.g., the one you used for your Form earlier.
Paste the URL of the spreadsheet you copied before into the Spreadsheet URL field (Ctrl+V on PC or Cmd+V on Mac).
Note: Each key corresponds to one spreadsheet in Google. If you have multiple spreadsheets, you'll create one key for each of the
spreadsheets. Clicking on the name of the key on your Presence statistics page will switch between the individual spreadsheets.
The currently active key is printed in boldface.
- Go back to your Google spreadsheet, and in the Form menu, click Go to live form:
- A new browser window/tab will open. Select and copy the address of this page.
- Go back to your Presence statistics page, and paste the URL you just copied into the Form URL field of the Add New Key dialog, and click OK.
Click on the name of the Key you just added to make it the active key.
Rezzing the inworld sensors
Once you have completed these steps, you can rez the inworld sensor(s).
- Rez the sensor, i.e., drag the sensor object from your inventory and drop it on the land where you want to place it.
- Give the sensor a meaningful name: right click the rezzed sensor, choose Edit, and in the General tab edit the sensor's Name field.
- Just after rezzing a sensor, it prompts you to enter the Form URL (to which it will send the data) in local chat.
This Form URL is the same as you copied in step 9. If you haven't copied anything else in the meantime, you can just press Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on Mac) in the local chat bar to paste the Form URL.
Hint: If you're adding a new sensor, but you didn't create a separate form/spreadsheet for the sensor, you can find the Form URL
on your Presence statistics page: click the Edit icon next to the name of a Key (in the Manage Keys stecion),
and you'll find the URL in the Form URL field.
- Adjust the sensor's settings (scan range and rate) to fit your requirements. See section 3 ("Operation and Adjustments") how to do that.
The sensor will start gathering data. You will notice that each time a visitor arrives or leaves, the corresponding sensor will send you a message.
(You can remove yourself from the messaging list, or you can add more people to the list, see below.)
After some data have been gathered, click the Refresh button on your Presence statistics page. It should now display your first visitor data.
3. Operation and Adjustments
Clicking on a sensor will bring up a menu from which you can choose options to
configure an individual sensor.
Note that only the owner can do this.
- Scan Radius
lets you set the scan radius of the sensor. Predefined values ranging from
5m to 96m can be selected, or custom values can be specified in local chat.
- Scan Rate
sets the rate how frequently scans are performed.
The lower the rate (in seconds), the better the accuracy, but the higher the
lag, and vice versa.
Lets you select from a predefined range between 15 seconds and 3 minutes.
User defined values can be specified in local chat.
Note: If you want to send visitor notifications to a lot of people, you must not set
the scan rate too high. There is a delay of 2 seconds after each notification.
- Scan Restrictions
allows you to restrict scanning to only the parcel in which the scanner was rezzed.
- Notifyees
manages the list of people who will be notified when a visitor arrives or leaves.
By default it contains the owner of the sensor.
- Excludees
manages the list of people who will be excluded from scanning.
This list is empty by default.
- Set Form URL
allows you to set a new Form URL to which the scanner will report (i.e., to change the
Google Spreadsheet in which the data is gathered).
- Show Config
shows the current sensor configuration.
- Chat Distance
If turned on, the sensor will chat the distance between it and your avatar in local chat every few seconds.
You can use this feature to determine the best scan radius. Note that the scan radius is limited to 96m (maximum).
Select again to turn chatting off.
- Restart Scanner
restarts the scanner in case it has stopped (due to sim restart or similar).
4. Advanced Options
The standard sensor comes as a sphere. However, the sensor script is copyable,
and you could copy it to the inventory from the default sensor object to put
it in any arbitrary object, which will act as sensor once it is in there.
Remember, however, that you will have to go through the setup process (i.e., enter the Form URL) before
the sensor is operational.
5. Change Log
- v3.2 (October 2014)
Support for new Google form URLs. Permission bug fix.
- v3.1 (May 2013)
New "Full Sim" sensor. Bug fixes.
- v3.0 (August 2012)
New Google Docs backend and new statistics presentation.
- v2.5 (September 2011)
Bug fixes (heavy traffic caused the sensor to crash).
- v2.4 (September 2010)
"Exclude" now also applies to chat notifications.
Scan restrictions (restrict to parcel).
Setup facility: chat distance to sensor.
Bug fixes (webpage-sensor interactions).
- v2.3 (February 2010)
Bug fix (Board inoperational after region restart)
- v2.2 (January 2010)
More statistics.
IM notification list.
Per sensor access list.
Exclude from tracking list.
Vacancy message.
Export functionality (Excel, CSV).
- 2.1 (January 2010)
Bug fixes
- v2.0 (January 2010)
Improved, now hassle free setup procedure.
Data of all the sensors/sensor management is now accessible on a web page.
- v1.1 (July 2009)
Hours per day are now displayed correctly.
- v1.0 (June 2009)
Initial version.