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."
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.
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!
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?
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"
Scientific papers (with specs) at: http://www.cs.unc.edu/Research/stc/teleimmersion/p ubs.html
-m