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Tele-Immersion at UC Berkeley

Posted by michael on from the holoprof9000 dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "Tele-immersion is a technology which allows cooperative interaction between groups of distant people working in the same virtual environment. At the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley, interdisciplinary teams are deploying this technology. It involves three real-time steps: taking images of a subject with 48 cameras, transmitting the images over a network, and implanting them in a virtual world. For example, it will allow students and professors on different campuses to meet -- virtually -- and discuss -- lively -- while being in ancient sites of Greece or Italy. The technology offers more promises than academics discussions. Imagine a nurse telling a diabetic how to make an insulin injection while being far away from him. Of course, this technology is facing some hurdles, such as the cost involved to model you with so many cameras. This summary shows you some details about the image processing involved in this project."

4 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. Cost limitation? by Tracer_Bullet82 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Not really.

    On days like these, I cant help to love capitalism.

    Given enough 'return on investments'; that is a smooth talking entreprenuer, it will be funded.

    a viable project would be golf lessons. I'm sure it wil be popular with the suit types. Cost have never really been an issue.

    The nurse thing works well too. Of course, "that kind" of nurse. :)

    --


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    parang sudah asah
    alang alang mandi
    biar sampai basah
  2. Novel idea by timeOday · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Instead of having 48 cameras around the subject so you can select a vantage point from any angle, why not just have one camera and ask the lazy bum to move around a little?

    Besides, I'd rather not be looked at from all sides at once. Of 48 cameras, odds are at least one is looking exactly up your nose.

  3. ooh by Matt_Joyce · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Dealing with such large amounts of data is an enormous task--just to start the cameras you must press 50 start buttons," he said.


    pfft. sounds sophisticated. not.
    Anyone else think 48 cameras seem like overkill ?

    This is not the future of telepresence.
    Plow the cash into better avatar modeling I say.
    If your not going to be there (wherever there is), why project images of yourself at all, just send an agent.

    Gibson, Stevenson and Egan were on the right track regarding avatars.
  4. Re:Telepresense: together, or apart? by Dejohn · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I have to suggest that maybe being connected in the sense that this article describes is close enough to "real" face-to-face communicate as to fulfull any additional human need.

    From a philisophical standpoint, being face-to-face is really just light, sound, and feelings being transmitted to and interpreted by your brain. If a virtual reality system (or whatever it might be) can adequatly stimulate these senses, I see no psycological problems with being "less connected" in a geographical sense. I think technology that allows us to connect with people, even at lower intensity levels than in-person, such as IM, email, or a video chat thingy can fulfill the human need for connection in a very similar way to reality. Maybe we'd all be safer and healthier if we were isolated to a little box with a computer terminal?