Allan Weis
This week’s recommended resource comes from Allan Weis, author of “The Business of Changing Lives”, detailing the potential and history of Tele-Immersion.
Imagine being with your grandson who is 1000 miles away – but he’s sitting on your lap and you can feel him and he can feel you. Give him a hug! He feels it. You can smell the freshness of his washed hair and feel the texture of his smooth skin. And the garlic on his breath from the pizza he had at lunch. Every one of your senses is alive and working in all dimensions.
Both of you like the beach so you change the backdrop of the environment to a sandy shore line and now you can smell the salt water and hear the waves crashing. Uncle Joe joins you from California – now there are three people on the beach. You can reach out and pick up a computer-generated crab and describe the species to your grandson.
Just about anything that you can imagine can be at your fingertips. Want to talk about molecular forces with your grandson, just say it and grab some molecules – feel the forces that act between them.
What a learning tool! Think about how schools could use this technology. Whatever exists in real life, or anything that is computer generated, is at your fingertips – and you can touch, feel, push and pull it to understand it.
Over thirteen years ago, we had the dream of a new paradigm for human communication – the ultimate synthesis of networking and media technologies – we called it Tele-Immersion.
It took a few years to demonstrate that dream and have computers recognize the presence and movements of individuals and track those images in three dimensions. In parallel, we projected those images in realistic, multiple geographically distributed immersive environments where individuals could interact with each other and with computer-generated models.
These immersive environments started out being only visual. You could sit with your grandson in the same room – you could move your head and look behind and see his dog. But, thirteen years from now all of the senses will be transportable – and wow hold on to your seat.
The only real limit is the speed of light! It’s too slow to make Tele-Immersion really effective at great distances – but that is something someone will work on next! To learn more of the detail about Tele-Immersion read “The Business of Changing Lives” by Allan Weis.
Be sure to check back next week for our next recommendation!
Science feature, resource of the week, teleimmersion
UC Berkeley’s tele-immersion lab is the focus of a new video on ZDNet, where they demonstrate some of their real-time scanning systems for remote teleimmersion.
VizWorld.com 
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