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."

Comments

Other Universities doing this

[Anonymous Coward]

Penn and Brown are doing this too.

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

Telepresense: together, or apart?

[QuantumFTL]

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

It's been done, two years ago

[GrAfFiT]

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 !

Cost limitation?

[Tracer_Bullet82]

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. :)

ooh

[Matt_Joyce]

"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.