- Wed May 23, 2012 10:17 pm
#4979
Real-world beaming: The risk of avatar and robot crime
First it was the telephone, then web cameras and Skype, now remote "presence" is about to take another big step forward - raising some urgent legal and ethical questions.
"Beam me up Scotty" - that simple phrase reminds us of Captain Kirk, whisked from alien worlds back to the Starship Enterprise via the magic of "teleporting", in the cult TV series Star Trek.
Beaming, of a kind, is no longer pure science fiction. It is the name of an international project funded by the European Commission to investigate how a person can visit a remote location via the internet and feel fully immersed in the new environment.
The visitor may be embodied as an avatar or a robot, interacting with real people.
Motion capture technology - such as the Microsoft Kinect games console - robots, 3D glasses and special haptic suits with body sensors can all be used to create a rich, realistic experience, that reproduces that holy grail - "presence".
The kit is getting cheaper all the time and researchers expect that in the near future it will be quite easy to set up a beaming-enabled room in a typical home. Beaming may also use less bandwidth than conventional video streaming.
Project leader Mel Slater, professor of virtual environments at University College London (UCL), calls beaming augmented reality, rather than virtual reality. In beaming - unlike the virtual worlds of computer games and the Second Life website - the robot or avatar interacts with real people in a real place.
He and his team have beamed people from Barcelona to London, embodying them either as a robot, or as an avatar in a specially equipped "cave". One avatar was able to rehearse a play with a real actor, the stage being represented by the cave's walls - screens projecting 3D images.
The technology is already good enough for "blocking" a play - working out how the actors should move around the stage - though emotion and facial expressions are not yet captured accurately enough to replace a traditional rehearsal. This may not be far off, however.
Teleconferencing would be transformed, once beaming is able to convey the non-verbal communication that people value, reducing the need for businessmen to jet around the world.
The cinema experience could also be "augmented". Click here to read more...
Source: BBC News
First it was the telephone, then web cameras and Skype, now remote "presence" is about to take another big step forward - raising some urgent legal and ethical questions.
"Beam me up Scotty" - that simple phrase reminds us of Captain Kirk, whisked from alien worlds back to the Starship Enterprise via the magic of "teleporting", in the cult TV series Star Trek.
Beaming, of a kind, is no longer pure science fiction. It is the name of an international project funded by the European Commission to investigate how a person can visit a remote location via the internet and feel fully immersed in the new environment.
The visitor may be embodied as an avatar or a robot, interacting with real people.
Motion capture technology - such as the Microsoft Kinect games console - robots, 3D glasses and special haptic suits with body sensors can all be used to create a rich, realistic experience, that reproduces that holy grail - "presence".
The kit is getting cheaper all the time and researchers expect that in the near future it will be quite easy to set up a beaming-enabled room in a typical home. Beaming may also use less bandwidth than conventional video streaming.
Project leader Mel Slater, professor of virtual environments at University College London (UCL), calls beaming augmented reality, rather than virtual reality. In beaming - unlike the virtual worlds of computer games and the Second Life website - the robot or avatar interacts with real people in a real place.
He and his team have beamed people from Barcelona to London, embodying them either as a robot, or as an avatar in a specially equipped "cave". One avatar was able to rehearse a play with a real actor, the stage being represented by the cave's walls - screens projecting 3D images.
The technology is already good enough for "blocking" a play - working out how the actors should move around the stage - though emotion and facial expressions are not yet captured accurately enough to replace a traditional rehearsal. This may not be far off, however.
Teleconferencing would be transformed, once beaming is able to convey the non-verbal communication that people value, reducing the need for businessmen to jet around the world.
The cinema experience could also be "augmented". Click here to read more...
Source: BBC News
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." R.Buckminster Fuller