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All Telepresence - News Story Entries

Telepresence: A Manifesto

September 2, 2010 | Chris Payatagool
The legendary pioneer of artificial intelligence calls for a remote-controlled robot economy

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Mind and Machine: Marvin Minsky holds a 14-jointed, three-elbowed, computer-controlled, hydraulically muscled mechanical arm that he built at his MIT lab in the 1970s. This photo appeared in the article "Telepresence," republished here, in the June 1980 issue of Omni.

Over 30 years ago, MIT professor and artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky laid out an ambitious plan calling for the development of advanced teleoperated robotic systems that would usher in a "remote-controlled economy." He coined the term "telepresence" to describe these systems, which in his futuristic vision would transform work, manufacturing, energy production, medicine, and many other facets of modern life. His plan appeared as an essay in the June 1980 issue of the influential--and now defunct--science and science fiction magazine Omni. Today, despite the advances in computers and robotics, Minsky's manifesto remains as current and compelling as ever, a powerful call for a technology that could bring about huge societal benefits. IEEE Spectrum reproduces here his essay in full.

Toshiba 3D TV line packs a surprise: No glasses

August 31, 2010 | Chris Payatagool

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Toshiba will release a 3D TV that utilizes glasses-free, autostereoscopy technology. One newspaper says the 3D sets will hit as soon as the end of the year.

By Matthew Shaer

Toshiba will release a new 3D television in Japan by the end of the year - and unlike previous Toshiba 3D TV sets, this one won't require the viewers to wear those pesky glasses. That's the word today from Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbu, which says the newest Toshiba televisions will use some sort of autostereoscopy 3D technology.

In an interview today with the Associated Press, Toshiba spokesperson Yuko Sugahara did not comment on rumors that a glasses-free 3D TV would hit shelves before the end of the year. But she did confirm that Toshiba was working on the technology. "Many people don't like to wear glasses to watch TV for a long time, especially people who must wear 3-D glasses over regular glasses," Sugahara said.

Cisco to buy Skype, pre-IPO? (and lock out)

August 30, 2010 | Chris Payatagool
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By Richi Jennings.

Here's an interesting rumor. Apparently, Cisco wants to buy Skype, thus skipping the P2P VoIP company's initial public offering. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers ponder what it all means (and if it's true).

Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment. Not to mention Valérie Lemercier's strangely hirsute shoulders...
(CSCO) (GOOG) (EBAY)


Michael Arrington crunches the rumors:

    Cisco has made an offer to acquire Skype ... says one of our more reliable sources. ... If true this would be one very big acquisition. Skype insiders are hoping for a ... valuation of $5 billion or so, we've heard.
    ...
    Google was also rumored to be sniffing around Skype, but antitrust concerns may have persuaded them not to make an actual offer. For M0RE


Brian Caulfield adds:

    A bid for Skype would head off a long-awaited initial public offering for the London-based company. It would also pit Cisco, a networking gear vendor, against Google, which has its own telephony offerings. For M0RE


Vu Telepresence parent Zenith Infotech Takes Top Honors in Three of Eight Award Categories at 2010 XChange Americas

August 30, 2010 | Chris Payatagool
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Zenith Infotech, an innovative technology company whose solutions include a managed service back office, disaster recovery solutions, U.S. based help desk, and a private cloud solution, took top honors across one-third of the award categories during Everything Channel's 2010 XChange Americas event last week. Technology solution providers attending the conference chose Zenith as the clear winner of this year's XChange XCellence awards, including XCellence in Service, Breakthrough Technology Vendor and Overall Best of Show categories.

IT solution providers selected Zenith for the XCellence in Service award based on the company's commitment to "solving real business technology needs" within strong market segments. Other contributing factors that led to Zenith's selection included the company's exceptional channel programs aimed at providing partners with solid profit margins.

In the Breakthrough Technology Vendor category, Zenith was recognized for both enhancing and introducing products that enable its partners to develop new revenue streams. The company recently launched its SmartStyle Computing line of cloud solutions targeted to the small-to-midsized business market, and Vu Tele Presence, which offers budget and environment friendly advantages of videoconferencing, but through a much more life-like and engaging experience.

HP's wide, wide, wide high-definition screen

August 25, 2010 | Chris Payatagool
HP's Phil McKinney shows off a wide, wide, wide high-definition screen

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By Dean Takahashi via VentureBea

Hewlett Packard is working on a display with a really wide screen. Phil McKinney, chief technology officer at the Personal Systems Group at HP, showed off the concept for the screen at the DisplaySearch Emerging Technologies conference this week in San Jose, Calif.

The screen is so wide that you can see an entire pro basketball court at the same time. McKinney referred to the screen as a "triple wide high-definition" screen that is created by stitching together images from lots of different cameras pointed at slightly different parts of the same scene. The company is working with the National Basketball League to develop truly immersive screens that make you feel like you're there on the sidelines.

"We can literally create the Jack Nicholson seat," McKinney said, referring to the courtside seat that actor Nicholson has had for more than three decades at Lakers games. "You get a fresh, seamless experience. You can see end to end, the entire width of the court."

Virtual reality you can touch

August 25, 2010 | Chris Payatagool
Researchers at the Computer Vision Lab at ETH Zurich have developed a method with which they can produce virtual copies of real objects. The copies can be touched and even sent via the Internet. By incorporating the sense of touch, the user can delve deeper into virtual reality.

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Sending a friend a virtual birthday present, or quickly beaming a new product over to a customer in America to try out - it sounds like science fiction, but this is what researchers at the Computer Vision Lab want to make possible, with the aid of new technology. Their first step was to successfully transmit a virtual object to a spatially remote person, who could not only see the object, but also feel it and move it.
Incorporating all the senses

The more senses are stimulated, the greater the degree of immersion in the virtual reality. While visual and acoustic simulation of virtual reality has become increasingly realistic in recent years, development in the haptic area, in other words the sense of touch, lags far behind. Up to now, it has not been possible to touch the virtual copy of an object, or to move it. The aim of the EU project "Immersence", in which ETH Zurich has also been involved, was to develop new methods for haptic interaction. Matthias Harders, together with other scientists from the Computer Vision Lab, led the sub-project which dealt with interaction between people and virtual objects.

HP projection technology could take a page from Star Wars

August 24, 2010 | Chris Payatagool
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By Paul Krill via InfoWorld

Businesspeople would be projected into meetings the same way R2D2 projected a hologram of Princess Leia

In the future, business meetings might seem like a scene out of the movie "Star Wars," if  technology envisioned at Hewlett-Packard comes to fruition.

Stars Wars-like 3-D projection technology is on the drawing board at the company, with the potential to project businesspersons at many locations into virtual reality-like meetings, reducing the need to hop on airplanes and spend significant time away from home.

"The whole concept behind how do you project somebody into the room is that you have people who are scattered around the country but you re-create them so that they feel like they're part of the room," said Phil McKinney, CTO for the Personal Systems Group at HP, at the Emerging Display Technologies Conference on Thursday in San Jose, Calif. This capability can be done in a low-resolution format today, but HP is pondering next-generation scenarios.

Telepresence and video conferencing: The business case

August 11, 2010 | Chris Payatagool
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By Georgina Swan via ComputerWorld

It could be any meeting room, anywhere, with one major difference: The room, within Sheraton on the Park hotel in Sydney, is a gateway to the world. At the push of a button, we are chatting to colleagues in Toronto, Canada, speaking to each other as if we were seated across the table. We see the nuances of facial expressions, hand gestures and presentations, full-size, clear and uninterrupted.

Until Starwood Hotels unveiled its suite at Sheraton on the Park in February, telepresence in Australia was little more than a showcase technology. Impressive, immersive and bleeding edge, vendors were keen to promote the benefits but, with a hefty pricetag, the concept of virtual meetings featured well and truly on the 'nice to have' side of CIO's priority lists, if indeed it featured at all.

Not that it isn't a compelling technology. Far from it. But organisations have been hard pressed to assemble a suitable business case for implementation. Starwood had no such issue. The group is in the midst of stage one of a global rollout that aims to install 70 telepresence suites in cities around the world by the end of this year. Tokyo has just come online, joining the likes of Chicago, London, Los Angeles and several locations across Asia. At the current rate of implantation, about six rooms are going live each month.

Holographic Displays, Robot Eyes Hint at Your Interactive Future (w/ Video)

August 9, 2010 | Chris Payatagool
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By Priya Ganapati via Gadget Lab

Not needing glasses for 3-D is enough to blow the minds of most people. But take it to the next step -- a 3-D display that isn't flat and requires no glasses -- and it becomes a prop from a sci-fi film.

In stores, Sony's pushing big, flat screen 3-D TVs that require a pair of special glasses. But in its labs, the company has created a prototype 3-D display wrapped in a cylinder that's 10 inches tall and has a diameter of 5 inches.

While it's smaller than a TV, that shape lets you stand anywhere in front of it and see a 3-D image, like a little holographic projection of Princess Leia. You can even reach into the display and turn the objects inside it to see them from all angles.

LifeSize Extends Reach into U.S. Federal Market with JITC Certification

August 9, 2010 | Chris Payatagool
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By Anuradha Shukla, TMCnet Contributor

LifeSize Communications, which designs and delivers high definition video communications products that provide a productive, true-to-life experience, has attained Joint Interoperability Test Command "JITC" certification forLifeSize ( News - Alert) Room, Team, and Express HD video conferencing systems as well as the LifeSize Networker gateway - in a bid to extend their reach into the U.S. federal market.

These products have gotten Interoperability Certification and Information Assurance accreditation from JITC, which provides a full-range of agile and cost-effective test, evaluation, and certification services to support rapid acquisition and fielding of global net-centric warfighting capabilities. JITC It is the organizational element of the Defense Information Systems Agency responsible for certifying joint and combined interoperability of all Department of Defense "DoD" information technology and national security systems.

Beyond the touchscreen: Projecting the future

August 7, 2010 | Chris Payatagool
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Imagine a cookie that changes flavour on the spot, or a furry computer display that you stroke when you miss your cat. It might sound like fantasy, but visitors to the SIGGRAPH computer graphics and animation conference in Los Angeles this month have experienced nothing less from the new technologies on display.

Here, New Scientist brings you some of the extraordinary computer displays on show - a preview of how we could interact with computers in the future.

1. One cookie, seven flavors

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Put on this headset and turn a plain cookie into your favourite flavour. Read more

Vidyo: Videoconferencing's Best Hope?

August 7, 2010 | Chris Payatagool
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A New Jersey startup gets pricey and basic systems communicating--and could be videoconferencing's ticket to the mainstream

By Peter Burrows via Bussiness Week

At most companies, videoconferencing has yet to evolve from a technological parlor trick into an everyday utility like e-mail. One reason is there's no cheap and easy way to make it available on all the devices people use. Even companies that opt for top-of-the-line equipment from Cisco Systems (CSCO) or Hewlett-Packard (HPQ)often pay nearly $1 million to upgrade the underlying corporate network, says IDC analyst Jonathan Edwards.

That's why tech industry veterans are keeping a close eye on Vidyo, whose technology will soon be sold by HP. The 120-person startup, based in Hackensack, N.J., makes software it says can run on almost any device that connects to the Net--and adjusts whether that's a high-speed link in the boardroom or a cell connection from the 18th hole. While most companies buy a few high-end videoconferencing systems for executives, "We want to connect millions of people," says Vidyo Chief Executive Ofer Shapiro.

Web 2.0 for TelePresence or Life After Second Life?

August 5, 2010 | Chris Payatagool
Interview about 3D virtual meeting platform VenueGen

By Xenia Von Wedal via Sys-Con Media

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In a meeting with the CEO of VenueGen, David Gardner, I am seated face-to-face with David's avatar in one of VenueGen's virtual board rooms. While answering my questions, he looks in my eyes and expresses to me how passionate he is about the topic when it dawns on me--what he really means with virtual interaction. I think to myself, "Oh wait, he is actually 2,000 miles away, his avatar is looking in my--avatar's--eyes..." *blush*

Is VenueGen the death of the webinar?

David Gardner: Not necessarily.  Different modalities are good for different uses. Well, the Internet certainly has revolutionized the way people consume media. The Internet is interactive, and so is the VenueGen virtual meetings platform. Virtual meetings are used for three things: everyday meetings, training, and events. Meetings and trainings are highly collaborative, and VenueGen provides a highly collaborative platform to meet this need, whereas webinars have been utilized largely for passive events, like watching TV. So, in short, if companies want Webinars where audiences are passive listeners, they can select a passive platform.  If companies want a virtual meeting that encourages participation, then they can select an interactive platform. Our view is that webinars and events will become highly interactive - that's where it's all heading.

Dave Grady Recreates Every Conference Call You Have Ever Been On

August 4, 2010 | Chris Payatagool

Adding sensation of temperature to users' experience of a simulated environment

August 2, 2010 | Chris Payatagool
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From Christopher Mims' Mims's Bits blog at MIT's Technology Review
via ISPR

Adding Temperature to Human-Computer Interaction

An experimental new game controller adds the sensation of hot and cold to users' experience of a simulated environment


Touch interfaces and haptic feedback are already a part of how we interact with computers, in the form of iPads, rumbling video game controllers and even three-dimensional joysticks. As the range of interactions with digital environments expands, it's logical to ask what's next: Smell-o-vision has been on the horizon for something like 50 years, but there's a dark horse stalking this race: thermoelectrics.

Based on the Peltier effect, these solid-state devices are easy to incorporate into objects of reasonable size, i.e. video game controllers.

In this configuration, just announced at the 2010 SIGGRAPH conference, a pair of thermoelectric surfaces on either side of a controller rapidly heat up or cool down in order to simulate appropriate conditions in a virtual environment.

Freakish Spermbot Could Be the Future of Japanese Communication (w/ Video)

August 2, 2010 | Chris Payatagool
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via Gizmodo

Telenoid R1, the robot brainchild of designer Hiroshi Ishiguro, is what I imagine it would look like if Casper the Friendly Ghost got lucky with a sperm. It could also be the future of telepresence in Japan.

The 11-lb. robot's arm stubs, flagella tail, eyes, mouth and limbs all move in tune with the user, courtesy 9 actuators contained within. And yes, the androgyny is on purpose because it theoretically allows both male and female users to use it to scare relatives and friends with equal ease.

And just how much does pure, androgynous terror cost? A cool $35,000, which, sadly, does not include the cost of therapy. A cheaper, although no less terrifying talking scarecrow version covered with cloth instead of silicone is expected to sell for $8,000 sometime in 2011.

Eye contact via Head-mounted Mobile Video Communication System (w/ Video)

July 30, 2010 | Chris Payatagool
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Head-mounted Mobile Video Communication System

At Wireless Japan 2010, the Nakajima Laboratory at the University of Electro-Communications exhibited a mobile videophone that enables truly effective communication, using a head-mounted display and various sensors.

"We think that a weakness of ordinary videophones is, they don't let people make eye contact. That's a big defect in terms of effective communication. We've created something that overcomes that defect."

This system has acceleration and position sensors built into a head-mounted display. A microcomputer detects the vertical and horizontal motion of the user's head, and controls the camera using a servomotor.

"The video captured by this camera is shown on a see-through head-mounted display. So when you put on the display and move your head around, you can see video linked to the movement of your head."

Meta Cookie uses augmented reality to control cookie flavor

July 29, 2010 | Chris Payatagool

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Real Cookies Butt Heads With Virtual Ones

By Stuart Fox, TechNewsDaily Staff Writer
via ISPR

LOS ANGELES -- Between the crunch, the buttery feel in your mouth and the rich taste, cookies seem pretty perfect already. But they're not quite perfect enough for Takuji Narumi of Tokyo University. Here at the SIGGRAPH computer animation and interactive technology conference, Takuji and his team unveiled their Meta Cookie system, which uses virtual reality to try to control the flavor of a cookie.

The Meta Cookie system takes advantage of a principle that any good chef knows: We taste with our eyes and nose before any food enters our mouth. By replicating the image of a cookie of a particular flavor through a virtual reality headset, and then reproducing the scent of that cookie using special perfume tubes aimed at the nose, the Meta Cookie can trick the user's brain into thinking that a flavorless sugar cookie is actually a chocolate or almond cookie.

Anybots launches "telepresence robots" to handle your business travel

July 28, 2010 | Chris Payatagool

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Silicon Valley startup Anybots is entering the increasingly competitive field "telepresence robot" market today with the release of its first robot. Telepresence robots work as stand-ins for people who operate them remotely.

A telepresence robot can, for example, tour a plant in China while the person controlling it follows along from their office in California. The tour guide could talk to the robot like they're talking to the person on the other end and can soon forget they're talking to a robot.

Cisco Systems' TelePresence and HP's Halo system, among others, already link two distant locations by a high-definition hookup with such sharp resolution that people on each end of the connection feel like they are in the same room. But telepresence robots go one step further: They can move out the conference room, down the hall, onto the factory floor, anywhere their motorized wheels can take them.

Human Presence Learning Environment brings human element to distance education

July 26, 2010 | Chris Payatagool
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The Human Element
From Inside HigherEd

Douglas E. Hersh's close crop of auburn hair and neatly trimmed goatee are clearly visible in an expandable window on my desktop. So are his light tweed blazer and matching tie. On a table behind his desk sits a purple orchid, lending color to his office -- 2,600 miles away from mine.

The technology that allows me to see Hersh's face as he speaks to me is not new. But Hersh, dean of educational programs and technology at Santa Barbara City College, believes it may hold the key to solving an old problem that has plagued distance education since its beginnings: the retention gap.

A growing body of research has all but obliterated the notion that distance education is inherently less effective than classroom education. But even the most ardent distance-ed evangelists cannot deny persistent evidence suggesting that students are more likely to drop out of online programs than traditional ones. The phenomenon has many explanations, not least the fact that what often makes students choose the flexibility of online learning -- being too busy to enroll in a classroom course -- can also make it harder for them to keep up with their studies.

In The Picture

April 12, 2010 | Howard Lichtman

TelePresence @ Home

February 4, 2009 | Chris Payatagool

FOXSexpert: Hooking Up to Internet Sex Toys

November 25, 2008 | John Serrao

Holobama: 'Holograms' greet Election 2008

November 6, 2008 | John Serrao

Home again

September 15, 2008 | Chris Payatagool

War Is Halo

July 28, 2008 | Chris Payatagool

WAN refresh

April 2, 2008 | Chris Payatagool

Just shoot me

February 24, 2008 | Chris Payatagool

Immersed in Work

February 14, 2008 | Chris Payatagool

Presence of mind

January 15, 2008 | Howard Lichtman

Liberate your avatar

December 20, 2007 | Chris Payatagool

Samsung: Next HDTV to Offer 8x Better Resolution

December 18, 2007 | John Serrao

Endless Self-Reinvention in Virtual Worlds

November 28, 2007 | John Serrao

It's Telepresence

November 14, 2007 | Chris Payatagool

Polycom Steps on the High Definition Gas

October 17, 2007 | John Serrao
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