Slashdot Mirror
UNC Researchers Demonstrate Tele-Immersion
bughunter writes: "Researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill have successfully demonstrated Tele-immersion, the next step in virtual reality which allows the live transmission of 3-dimensional representation of real scenes. Don't look for tele-immersed streaming porn just yet; it seems the sheer volume of bandwidth the demonstration consumed caused a minor panic among the Internet 2 gateway admins at UNC."
The myth that FTL travel will somehow magically cause you to go back in time is held by many otherwise intelligent people. I have no idea why.
At least one of the four fundimental forces of the universe is instantanious (according to the most popular theory amoung physics people) and quantum communication also offers real world instant communication.
Gravity operates apparatly faster than the speed of light. Research is going on to see if it's something like the speed of light squared or if it really is instantanious. But in no way is it connected to the time arrow.
Quantum communication works by splitting lots of particles into two "possibly existing" pairs, send one of each pair to the "sender", and the other of each pair to the "reciever". Since they have an absolute connection that may or may not be affected by the speed of light, each operates as one bit in a message. It's up to you to work out the protocol - I can think of a half dozen in the time it takes to write this paragraph.
Please ignore misspellings or blatant grammatical errors... I'm jetlagged and just woke up.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Slashdot keeps mangling my html. Specifically the closing "/a" tags. Let's try again.
Slashdot didn't "rip" that story. It published a link to that story. You're making the same indistinction that the MPAA and the Hon. Lewis A. Kaplan is guilty of.
And by no means does New Scientist own a copyright on the UNC researchers' results ...
I can see the fnords!
Moreover, that might well be one of the *few* practical uses for it, due to a flaw in the underlying principle.
Pornography (in its current state) is based on the illusion of the viewer's immersion in a distant environment. The system described may handle this kind of one-way immersion someday (though perhaps on ultra-DVD ROM, rather than on-line) It would be difficult to support mutual immersion in each others environments (as opposed to limited interaction, like teledildonics), even without the bandwidth issue. In general, I think you'll find that true immersion and interactivity would "break the metaphor" of real life in too many ways to ever be useful.
I have a sneaking suspicion Miss November is quite happy she doesn't have to experience her many viewers and their environments. Mutual immersion in telecommuting is, quite possibly, just as undesirable. In the UNC experiment, the remote sites in NY and Philly couldn't percieve the lab, but if they could, it would be unuseful, at best, and confusing at worst. Which environment would they be be immersed in - their office, or the lab?
I call the currently imaginable one-way immersion "Tele-insertion" (no lewd pun intended) because it places one person in a distant environment. In the distant environment, the remote viewer, himself, should have only a limited representation. This becomes increasingly important when multiple remote streams interact with the same office - and each other. Once you make this distinction, and abandon the dream of full mutual immersion, it becomes clear that you might as well stick to video conferencing. Teleinsertion, as an end to itself, is only useful in limited settings, like hazardous environments and exploration - and even then, I woun't be holding my breath for the suitable hardware (yes, I know about all the stuff their doing at NASA, etc. -- *they* can hold their breaths if they like. Not me)
A more "practical solution" might be to build telecommuting home-office-cum-studios that resemble generic corporate office and dress office-appropriate at home (But no one wants to see you in your boxers and the piles of laundry in your bedroom; your client may fail to be charmed by your children playing their usual game of screeming meemies, chasing each other up and down the hall outside your door, wailing at the top of their lungs; and your spouse better not barge into your office, fuming, when she sees the $10K you racked up this month in teledildonics charges)
Sometimes limited interaction is a good thing.
Sometimes more realism is pointless - That's why we don't have CD-quality quadrophonic telephones.
Hey, I'm not knocking these guys. It's research - and I'd venture to say some relatively mainstream communications innovations probably came came out of the decades old (and, as of yet, fruitless) dream of 'a video phone in every house'. But on its own merits, it's hard to imagine why we'd want 'immersive environments' *except* for entertainment.
"But, it is well known, what strikes the capricious mind of the poet is not always what affects the mass of readers." -
I have worked as a body guard for several porn actresses and they were about as exploited as any other very wealthy person. Not one of them had any trouble depositing their large paychecks. Women in porn know and understand exactly what they are doing; which is taking advantage of the fact that men are turned on by visual stimuli.
If anyone is being exploited in porn it is the lonely guys who buy it. That 'porn exploits women' line is just a bunch of unattractive, jealous, women trying to make men feel guilty for being men. It is a power game and nothing else. Any men who buy into that guff are viewed with contempt by the women who spout it. If those feminists thought they were good looking enough to be topless dancers or work in porn they would do it in a flash; they don't have any 'moral' problems with it - mostly they're just angry that they don't look like porn stars. Women's brains don't work the same way male brains do. What women say and what they do are two different things. Women do a lot of things they don't want to talk about.
Bear in mind that a computer scientist from only 50 years ago would have laughed (wistfully) at the idea of fitting millions of transistors into the palm of one's hand; he or she would simply have had no way of knowing that the microprocessor would be invented. Heck, even just five years ago I couldn't imagine getting more than 56K over my home phone line (...and I can make calls at the same time? Yeah, right...)
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
It seems that the holodeck will end up being more important (and more possible) than the transporter. If you had a room that could generate 'real' spaces, then two people in linnked rooms wouldn't be any different than if one person transported to the other.
The difference is there's a steady, contiguous progression from videoconferencing to a holodeck, but a transporter requires whole fields of science we have no idea how to tackle.
I wonder how long it'll be before everyone has a holodeck in their house and they just never leave...
(BTW, Roddenberry hardly invented the holodeck. Check out The Veldt, written by Ray Bradbury in 1951.)
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
I can't wait to play Virtual Virtual Skeeball on one of these. It'll be just like playing Virtual Skeeball!
Everything I said in that post is simple fact. I have several years experience working in S.O.B's, (Sexually Oriented Businesses.) People who haven't worked in that industry know about as much about it as people who haven't worked in the computer industry know about building and programming computers. (And yes, I realize that you can study the computer industry in college. I count that as generally 'working in the business'. There aren't any degrees offered in the S.O.B. field; the only practical way to know about that business is to work in it.)
Most people who have worked in the business would agree with most of what I had to say. I've seen women light up when they realized that they were good looking enough to be dancers. I've also had women (plural) admit to me that the sort of feminist rhetoric I talked about is just a power game designed to make men feel guilty. A lot of what women say and do is just to get a reaction out of us. Sorry, that is the way the world works.
Most likely I am the only person in this forum who is qualified to write on the subject. Of course - this being Slashdot - a truth like that won't keep people from expressing clueless opinions.
Are you sure?
I can see the fnords!
A giant Magnetic Resonance Imaging chamber and sending all the data over as voxels? Of course the colors would be all wrong...
Use complex echolocation (or perhaps with radar?) from multiple transmitters/receivers to create a composite surface map of everything, render on the fly and image-map from cameras onto the model...
for tactile feedback overide signals in the spinal column, mapped for each individual user's particular feedback profile (since no two bundle of nerves is alike)? - not sure how the over-ride would be done, actually.
Have an robotic mannequin linked to a motion tracking suit, like in that goddawful movie FX2, and have it shipped to wherever you want to go.
train a monkey to act just like yourself. your colleagues can train and send their own monkey.
save the money and hire a grad student to do all the on-site work.
[pink beam of light]
Either they are under-designing I2 - or this 'telepresence' requires _ALOT_ of bandwidth*: "Chapel Hill needed 60 megabits per second. High-quality tele-immersion will require even more-around 1.2 gigabits per second."
I2 is based on IP over Sonet "Abilene is operating initially at OC-48 (2.4 gigabits per second) backbone links. In parallel, we are working with our partners to develop additional links running at OC192 (9.6 gigabits per second) and beyond. When this technology is sufficiently proven we expect to deploy it as part of the main backbone available to all attached members." Abilene is the I2 backbone. So if this one telepresence session required 1/2 of all the available I2 bandwidth... i expect to be able to use Telepresence sometime in say... 2150. I understand further I2 deployment will increase the available bandwidth, but this will take some serious time. Having DSL/Cable is still a luxury - not the norm! At this time, i guess we'll all have fibre-sonet routers in our computer rooms (or whatever).
Dont mean to sound 'down' - but this is tech we'll (average layman) will not have for some time. Unfortunately.
*Before you flame 'yeah its alot.. uhh 1.2gigabits is a tonne dude!" remember alot is a relative term.
In any case I've already received the highest moderation possible for a geek. One night I was working with Vanna Lace - who was the reigning Miss Nude World. Between her shows we talked for a couple of hours. She is quite intelligent, and was one of the people who helped me understand women better. Just before she left she said: "Here is my name and home address; write to me when you have your theories written down.
That would be a moderation of:
+10 Miss Nude World gives you her real name and home address.
Now that is moderation points worth having. I'm willing to bet I'm the only geek in history to ever get one of those.
Not sure if or how it would work, but...
Imagine a "spherical" speaker - instead of a cone moving in/out in a single linear dimension, imagine the sphere "inflating/deflating". No matter where you were positioned, the audio would always be correctly spatially oriented.
Of course, I'm no audio engineer, so my thinking could be WAAAY off. Anybody have comments?
I support the EFF - do you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I'll be sure to check Time for Joel Stein's latest teledildonics installment. And I suppose those Slim Jim commercials will take on a whole new disgusting reality... step into a Slim Jim!
________________________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Ok, so realtime immersion takes huge amounts of bandwidth, but do you think they could come up with acceptable compression for it? Perhaps this is a new use for the super-dense CDs?
On another note, I thought the one thing that killed the illusion of immersion was a delay between movement and the environment's reaction. Obviously, these new 3D projected rooms fix that problem with VR headset latency, but for fully interactive tasks (not just looking), will Internet2 be able to respond quickly enough?
Does my bum look big in this?
I saw Henry Fuchs give a presentation on this at the University of Rochester, I was MILDLY impressed by this. However, I think one should note that the projecters employed by this system were not on the market yet and were priced in the amny of thousands of dollars each. Fuchs seemed to forget that not all of us have ~10,000 bucks to toss at a computing system to operate this.... nevermind the bandwidth to power this.
Don't look for tele-immersed streaming porn just yet
nice one. this person knows exactly what the regular slashdotter will be thinking about first off.
http://etclab.mie.utoronto.ca/
Researchers here have been dealing with the lag and discontinuity involved in remote operation and immersion. They're applying technology to realworld situations that require visual data augmentation (hybrid, overlay displays) plus virtual control of robotics.
Calum
The projector look like COTS stuff (as the military loves to call them .cs .unc.edu/Research/stc/Pics/May2000Demo/Demo/DCP_16 91.JPG
check the picture at http://www
"Make sure you get your government mandated minimum daily requirements of PORN today"
Interesting as a proof of concept though.
I *really* doubt that there will be a tactile element to this, star trek gee whiz factors aside.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The one thing that bothered me about this article is the "Imagine seeing and touching your first grandchild in a New York hospital - from Sydney" part. There's nothing in the article about tactile simulation. That's another ball game. So far they just have a clever 3D projector. It certainly has potential, but we have four other senses. It especially troubles me that no mention was made of the audio system. Are they going to go with an ever more complex surround system(which seems to add more channels with every new iteration), or perhaps a simpler stereo, perceptually encoded system like QSound? I'm one of the old-school engineers who believes that, since we have two ears we only need two transducers.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Um, yeah, I'm something of an SF buff, so I've read about that a couple of times, but I chose not to mention it in the comment, since it's not exactly resolved... Thanks for pointing it out, though.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
Yep. We've seen it before. First the technology was so expensive it could only be seen in a couple of large Japanese cities, but just a few short years later everyone and his kid sister has a "gadget". Gots to keep up with the Joneses, if only for the sake of mutually assured destruction.
This post is made from 100% pure sleep deprivation.
Tele-Immersion? This thing eats up processing cycles and bandwidth like nobody's business, all for the sake of a semi-shared environment that looks realistic. It smacks of the same problems of doing high-framerate "flat" videoconferencing on today's internet. IOW, they are feeding a lot of data down the pipe that just doesn't need to go.
A better solution is to give every individual a high-quality HMD (with full tracking). Each individual could have their own client machine driving their HMD (each machine would have the model data for shared "room", and model data of the individuals would be distributed across the network). Perhaps each individual has some way to navigate the world, and manipulate it.
Then, instead of piping all this data, just share vertex position information (along with textures, sound, etc), with each client machine rendering the scene for each individual. With current broadband connections, high quality could be achieved easily. Why does all this sound familiar?
Q3A or UT, anyone? Aside from the HMD, it is all there - one just needs apropriate models and skins to more acurately represent real people, as well as some way to share sound (hey, a partyline telephone call could work in a pinch - ideally it would be shared over the net as well). Maybe Half-Life would be better at representing people.
Would it look "real"? Not completely, but we get closer every day on the graphics front - indeed, there are already modeling projects that look damn fine, but incorporation into a 3D engine is ways off (but probably not too far off). And does it really matter how it looks - how real it looks? For some apps, of course - the more accurate the better. But for regular conferencing or meetings, it doesn't need to be highly accurate.
I support the EFF - do you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
When scientists work on technology they hardly have affordability in mind. The chief objective is to first get the breakthrough, and then later versions that are affordable will follow. And if it weren't for this where would funding for reasearch stand?
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
New Scientist issue: 21 October 2000
PLEASE MENTION NEW SCIENTIST AS THE SOURCE OF THIS STORY AND, IF PUBLISHING ONLINE, PLEASE CARRY A HYPERLINK TO: http://www.newscientist.com
For a 'news' site which rips every single story from elsewhere on the internet you could at least be polite.
:wq
If you can affect another locale, you can send information.
As soon as you open the one you kept (also at noon tomorrow), you instantly know what colour the other one is. But what good does it do you as a means of transmitting information?
Let's say you are going on a nice long trip to Saturn. You want to be able to talk instantly with Earth (you're at war with another group out there... war's good for producing "impossible" or "barely theoretical" tech like radar or atomic fission). You seperate out 5MB worth of bits, leaving one set in a virtual box on Earth, and the other set on your ship (obviously beyond our sota, but theoretically possible - I think it was Cern that has gotten one particle to be in two locations several inches apart). Each bit exists either/both on Earth and on the ship. - until you observe one, and (I'm mangling the physics term here, but it's something like) the wave of probability collapses, and it only exists where you "observed" it. (Observe does not have the same definion here as it does on the street).
Every (l) seconds, you check the next bit. If it is not set (i.e., it has been already expressed as set on the other end), then you know you have a message, and start reading the stream until you hit a "end of message" marker, and then you resume periodic checking.
Your latency is (l), you should be compressing your message (once the bits are used up, you are waiting several hours for the next transmission), and with only a bit more complexity, you can have full-duplex communication. Oh, and the GNU utility to check for messages should be called qbiff.
Also, "speed of light squared" is total nonsense, so I wouldn't trust the source you got that from.
Sorry to imply that was an actual theory - I was just admitting that nobody *knows* how fast gravity propogates. (Interesting that the other person who replied said it was bunk, and then proceeded to link to a reference article that said no scientific experiements have been done yet... of course, he also said gravity wasn't a fundimental force. He must not read even this site). It was a "It could be A, it could be B, heck, it could be A squared for all we know" type statement. I didn't mean to imply that there was support to c squared being the speed of propagation of gravity.
Disclaim: While I am not a professional scientist, I have access to several, and pester them about every good Scientific American article or fluffy BBC news piece that catches my fancy. The best scientists look at me funny sometimes, go away, and in two weeks tell me all about the new subject, sometimes with rants about how poor the science was, sometimes with enthusiasm.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
(You Said:)And exactly how did you think you'd be able to see if the bits are "set" or not?
Because half a second before, on Earth, they have set, or not set the bit. It can only exist in one location, and as far as experimental data indicate, that location is the first "observed". Until the observation, physicists use fancy terms like "standing probability waves" to name the potential particle that exists at both locations. Once you observe one location, the waves collapse, and it exists at that location.
If they (to use an old AppleBasic term) keep peeking at the bits that they want to set, and let you set the bits that should be set on your end by your act of observation, then that is a valid channel of communication.
BTW - I'd love to move this to email, mebbie posting the results if I've erred in my understanding. Email me at slashdot@timewarp.org.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Sigh. No, the previous post was the flamebait, mine was the flame. This moderator is truly clueless.
Scientific papers (with specs) at: http://www.cs.unc.edu/Research/stc/teleimmersion/p ubs.html
-m