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Tele-Immersion at UC Berkeley
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."
It would be better if I would tell the Nurse...
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~sequence/ http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/research/telei/home.h tml
And Internet2 has this type of technology as one of its goals. See http://www-pagines.fib.upc.es/~si/treballs-SI2001/ e4024048/Tele-immersion.htm
I have a general question for the /.ers out there: do you feel that this kind of technology will tend to bring people together more, or apart?
I mean, when you can be 100 cool places at the flip of a button, why settle for wherever you are right now? Same with social stuff - why "put up with" the boring people next door instead of flipping on the immersive internet and talking to others who share your interests?
This is happenning already. Most of my communication with friends is IM, email, or cell phone. The amount of face-to-face talking, in real life, is astoundingly low. Is this a good thing? I mean, I can keep tabs with people around the country - and around the world. But it's not the same.
I can see a lot of legitimate business uses for this technology, and who wouldn't want to be able to attend famous lecturer's sessions without the need to travel (or fear of being caught sleeping)? I'm just worried that it will become an even stronger isolating force in our society.
Also, will telepresense bring about more outsourcing - why pay for a secretary who's right there, when for 1/10th the price you can have one from India, by telepresence, for the 90% or whatever things that need done that don't require actual presense.
Just some questions to think about.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
This is neat, but what is the minimum cost for a setup? All kinds of nifty communication technologies have been envisioned, but the cost and compatibility is always the deal-breaker.
Often the cost of upkeep on systems exceeds their actual worth.
Porn would be a good cash cow for funding the research.
In France, the Research and Development dept of France Telecom has been doing this since 2002.
Here's some nice flash presentation, some documentation and a PDF
And they use H263+ and G722 !
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.
No, this will be used so that horny people can play 'student and professor' virtually.. I mean, I read this and thought, "Wow, now I can do Paris Hilton without getting a disease."
In other words, the main purpose of this is porn. Shuddup.. PORN.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
I think the reasoning is for arctic settlements or something, but flying in all the equipment, technicians, communications lines etc would probably be more expensive than just setting up a clinic staffed by a nurse.
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.
Timang tinggi tinggi
parang sudah asah
alang alang mandi
biar sampai basah
Does our fracturing into interest-based communities bode ill for the future? I'm not sure, but it does seem that at least here in the United States it has helped to create a society where people talk past each other, avoiding unpleasant in-person discussions about social issues or political issues. Instead we retreat behind virtual walls, haul out Blogger, and start pounding on each other.
It is of course possible that I'm looking at this the wrong way, because as towns and cities become increasingly impersonal, gobbled up by cloned shopping malls, the need to find people you can relate to on any level increases. Slashdot is a great example of this. How many people in my home town with whom I could share Slashdotish interests could I actually meet through random encounters in the computer section of the bookstore?
I guess this sort of immersive virtual technology is just like most technology in that it is value neutral. It all depends on how we humans make use of it.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
That should generate more than a little network traffic.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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.
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.
"Dealing with such large amounts of data is an enormous task -- just to start the cameras you must press 50 start buttons," he said.
They always select a quote which paints you as a simpleton.
Java: the COBOL of the new millenium.
from summary: "Tele-immersion is a technology which allows cooperative interaction between groups of distant people working in the same virtual environment. " Wow, considering we barely have cooperative interaction between groups of different people working in the same office building
The big use for this technology will be companies that are offshoring high value jobs to low wage countries. Communication has been the only effective barrier to this happening... the more stuff like this comes out the worse the job market looks in high wage countries.
If the tech is "real" enough then people like sales and management, thought to be immune to the whole offshoring thing, will be that much less safe.
(To save poor Ronald's site from being cash, er slashdotted)
Meeting Your Professor in Ancient Sicily
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. But read more...
Here is the inroduction of the Daily Californian article, which really is a news release from the University of California.
UC Berkeley students may soon be able to meet professors at UC Davis in ancient Sicily for lively intellectual discussions. Recent visual computer science advances by Ruzena Bajcsy, director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley, may make such interactions possible.
Bajcsy's technology takes pictures of a subject in her laboratory from 48 different cameras and combines them into a 3-D image. The image can then be placed into historical Sicily, one of the three cyberspace environments created so far. But how does this work?
Here is an illustration of the three-step process of the project: real-time image processing, followed by real-time data transmission and finally real-time image rendering. (Credit: CITRIS)
You'll find more details about this process at the CITRIS Tele-Immersion Project home page, which adds this about the above image.
First, a three dimensional structure and appearance of the scene is captured by processing image data from multiple viewpoints using stereo algorithm. Second, the acquired scene information is then transmitted to remote sites through high-bandwidth networks, where lastly it is combined with the interactions of the user and displayed dichoptically to reproduce realistic scene rendering.
And what can we expect from such a technology?
"Bajcsy has been really visionary with all of this. We've imagined these things and she's been working with us to make them real," said David Goldberg, director of the UC system Center of Humanities, a collaborator on the project. Art historians, anthropologists and archeologists working with Goldberg have imagined a virtual museum using Bajcsy's technology where both experts and the public could virtually pick up objects and study them.
The new insights could be far-reaching. Bajcsy aims to impact common people, by studying how people behave and trust each other in cyber environments. Specifically, one could study the difference between cyberspace interaction and a face-to-face interaction, or between interactions where the whole body or just the face or hands are visualized.
However, this technolgy faces several hurdles, such as confusing colors between the user's clothes and the virtual environment. But there are others, such as the fact that this technology is not -- currently -- wireless, and that this huge number of cameras invoves a hefty pricetag.
Currently, a cable is required to transmit the large amount of information from the two sites to the digital environment. The cable is expensive and can only be used between the two sites, but Bajcsy hopes to make the technology available to many social scientists who have only meager funding.
"Digitizing (approximately) 50 cameras into the computer is not easy," said Professor Takeo Kanade, a Carnegie Mellon professor who has performed similar research. "Dealing with such large amounts of data is an enormous task -- just to start the cameras you must press 50 start buttons," he said.
Sources: Erica Rosenberg, The Daily Californian, October 27, 2004; and various websites
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
And why is he posting an article on a subject that was featured in Scientific American in 2001?