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