"Virtual Bridge" Between London, Vienna Et Al.

dr.matrix writes "Read in Heise (German) how Tholos Systems wants to create a huge outdoor 360 degree video conference between all european capitals, starting with London and Vienna." Pretty impressive technology, but the purpose is still a bit unclear.

Comments

deaf europeans

[The Shrubber]

Could stand in front of these bridges and sign to each other, sign languages being more mutually intelligible than spoken languages.

Re:deaf europeans

[sebi]

Considering that a lot of British people don't speak Austrian German, I would suggest most people, hearing or deaf, would resort to the internationally understood language of giving them the finger.

A lot of Austrian people speak English, though. Or they are at least faking it on Slashdot. Look at me for a perfect example. And English people quite frequently give two fingers instead of just the one.

Re:deaf europeans

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know. Speaking as an Englishman who has a Dutch father and married an American, I think the whole supposed "xenophobic attitude" that England is supposed to have is simply a myth blown way out of proportion by the usual tabloid media.

I do wish people would be less schitzophrenic about the E.U though. Thats the tabloid media influance yet again though.

Re:The facts.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Additionally people will be able to contact their counterparts at the other cylinder in "sound and picture"

Now that's what I'm talking about. Being able to talk to loved ones in other cities. It does bring up interesting questions though, such as "if one were to drop trow and flash someone in Vienna from London who has the jurisdiction?"

Will LED drums be used for the televisions?

[kobotronic]

In Japan, at the Yokohama central train station there is a large cylindrical television about 2 meters in diameter. It's visually quite impressive and the colors are good. When you touch the glass you can feel the powerful hum of the revolving drum inside. From examining photographs of the outside of the cylinder taken at various exposure times, it appears it's made with approximately 24 groups of 3 vertical LED bars, one for each primary color.

These bars sweep by the viewer at great speed and 'paint' each pixel dozens of time per second. Similar to DLP projectors, each pixel is illuminated in turn by the different colors. When you look close on one pixel, you can see it's sort of fluctuating. What you're really looking at is a rapid progression of dozens of different colored LEDs flashing their light at you at the same physical point in space. The final result is a very smooth and stable image with a high refresh rate, great brightness and very rich LED colors.

I wonder if a technology similar to the one above will be used for these booths. Although a busy train station at a major earth quake zone could be considered a particularly hostile environment for a precision engineered rapidly rotating drum of considerable mass, I could easily imagine some european capitals constituting an even more hostile environment in terms of rampant vandalism.

The technology required to build these things are probably nothing much special, but I think it's a fun neat idea. Perhaps each drum will be switching between cities on regular posted hours and according to some kind of schedule so you can plan ahead to "meet" a friend from another city. These things should be placed by plazas and intersections with lots of pedestrians.

Another thing - just 3 cameras? That'll probably mean highly oblique angles for most of the people standing right next to the drum, which in turn might mean you don't get all that much out of 'meeting' someone. It would be something truly special if you could look directly at the virtual representation of someone standing right alongside the remote screen and they'd look right back at you.

Will it work as intended?

[Psychic Burrito]

As I see it, this is a free, virtual window into another city. Very nice for separated love couples in two different cities: "Let's meet at the cylinder" etc.. And funny for innocent passer-bys that can see wave and say "hi" to people from another city.

However, I think the most critical question is: will people be able to look into each other eyes like you would when you are looking trough a real-world window? Well the answer lies in the german article: "Im Inneren eines Zylinders sind sechs HDTV-Projektoren, 22 Mikrofone, 22 Lautsprecher und drei Kameras untergebracht" - "Inside the cylinder there are 6 hdtv projectors, 22 mics and 3 cameras". Only 3 cameras! How will it be possible for more than 3 people to look into their eyes then? Not at all, methinks...

I think not being able to look into each other's eyes through this virtual window will reduce the coolness factor of the cylinder to an overhyped TV/webcam combo...

Telecom companies against the project

[G4from128k]

Think of all the lost long-distance telephone revenues if you can just agree to meet your friend "at the wall' and talk all you want. I wonder if fights will break out over people who are wall hogs.

Of course, if the wall crowd is too noisy, then people will just get on their cellphones to talk to their wall-buddies. And with those cellphone cameras, you can take a picture of your remote friend on the wall who is taking a picture of you on the their wall and exchange pictures.

Re:huh?

[sebi]

While it doesn't say so explicitly after reading this article I am under the impression that they will install the things in the purely pedestrian areas at the centre of the participating cities. It seems like the boss of the company hinted on a possible placement in front of Vienna's Stephansdom. That placement would be perfect for traffic, but maybe not that ideal for unifying Europe. The Stephansplatz is where you will always find more tourists than natives (expect maybe at new years eve) anyway, but I couldn't think of a better place myself.

And about the flashing: That will definitely come from the brits. They seem to be really crazy about the sport. Definitely more so than other countries.

Re:Cool idea., but

[Bunji X]

Ah, but then you forget that I forgot that we need at least 15 to 20 images/second for anything resembling life-like video. My calculations was based on 1 frame/s. (not likely)

We would get 20971520*24*20=9600 MB raw data every sec. Which at a 1:100 compression rate would be 96 MB/s. Still way too much for a 100MBit network to handle, excluding audio.