If you've ever watched "Star Trek," you may remember seeing
the crew of the Starship Enterprise live out their fantasies
in a room called the holodeck. The holodeck was a
giant, holographic projection room that allowed the crew to
touch and interact with projections as if they were in a big
video
game. Scientists today are developing a new communications
technology that will allow you and your friends to interact
inside a simulated environment even if you are thousands of
miles apart.
Tele-immersion will allow us to manipulate
holographic projections as if they were real
objects. |
Most of the basic components for this network are already
in place to allow the development of tele-immersion.
Tele-immersion is the scientific community's answer to the
holodeck.
By combining cameras
and Internet
telephony, videoconferencing has allowed the real-time
exchange of more information than ever without physically
bringing each person into one central room. Tele-immersion
takes videoconferencing to the next level. It will create a
central, simulated environment that will allow everyone to
come together in one virtual room, and no one will have to
leave their physical location to do so. In this article,
you'll find out how employees in Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo
and Paris will soon meet in a tele-immersive environment and
shake hands with holographic images of their co-workers.
Beyond Videoconferencing
In the office of
the future, you won't call people with a phone.
You will command your computer
to call a particular person. "Computer, call Joe at the London
office." Suddenly, one of your office walls will flicker and
Joe will be sitting across from you as if he were right there.
On the other end, Joe will experience the same immersive
connection. That's the idea behind tele-immersion: bringing
two or more distant people together in a single, simulated
office setting. Business travel will be practically
unnecessary.
This type of communication will take us beyond the limits
of videoconferencing. Have you ever used a Webcam
to teleconference with another person? If you have, then
you've seen that videoconferencing via the Internet is not a
perfect form of communication. The image is close to
real-time, but there are delays that cause a jerking video.
Also, if someone walks out of view of that one camera, you can
no longer see the person. With tele-immersion, people can't
walk out of the view of the camera. In fact, you can peer
around their office just by looking at the display screen from
different angles. It's like having a window to look through.
Holographic environments will be generated by computers
with computing speeds thousands of times faster than your PC.
There are several steps to constructing a holographic
environment:
- The computer recognizes the presence and
movements of people and objects.
- The computer tracks those images.
- The computer projects those images on a
stereo-immersive surface.
There are several groups
working together on the National
Tele-Immersion Initiative (NTII) to bring us all together
in these virtual environments. In May 2000, researchers at the
University
of North Carolina (UNC), the University
of Pennsylvania and Advanced
Networks and Services reached a milestone in developing
this technology. A user sitting in an office at UNC in Chapel
Hill, NC, was able to see lifelike, three-dimensional images
of colleagues hundreds of miles away, one in Philadelphia and
the other in New York.
Tele-immersion may sound similar to virtual reality, but
there are key differences between the two technologies.
Virtual reality allows you to move in a computer-generated 3-D
environment, but tele-immersion, for now, can only create a
3-D environment that you can see -- you can't interact in it.
The next step is to merge tele-immersion and virtual reality
to allow users to alter the scenes that they see.
The applications for immersive holographic environments are
endless. Imagine a video
game free of joysticks, in which you become a participant
in the game, fighting monsters or scoring touchdowns. Instead
of traveling hundreds of miles to visit your relatives for the
holidays,
you'll simply call them up and join them in a shared
holographic room. Eventually, you will even be able to hug
other people using this technology. Doctors and soldiers could
use tele-immersion to train in a simulated environment.
Building a Holographic Environment
The early
prototypes of tele-immersive displays require users to wear
special goggles and a head device that tracks the viewpoints
of users looking at the screen. On the other end, the people
that appear as 3-D images are being tracked with an array of
seven ordinary video
cameras, while two other video cameras capture real light
patterns projected in each room to calculate distances. This
enables the proper depth to be re-created on the screen. So,
if a viewer moves his head to the right, he can see the
corresponding images that would be seen if he were actually in
the room with the person on the screen.
Images on the screen are split and polarized to create a
different image for each eye. The goggles then combine these
images so that the brain
recognizes only one 3-D
image. This process is similar to how those old 3-D movie
glasses work. Early experiments, like the one at UNC in May,
have experienced some glitches, similar to those of normal
video-conferencing. The scenes being projected are only
refreshed three times per second, which creates a jerky
image. If that rate could be improved to 10 frames per
second, it would create a seamless projected image that would
be like looking through a window at another person. Scientists
are developing new technologies to support this type of
communication, including:
- Internet2 - This would replace the current Internet
infrastructure. This new network will have a higher
bandwidth and speeds 1,000 times faster than today's
Internet. This high-bandwidth, high-speed network is
necessary to transfer the large amounts of data that
tele-immersion will produce.
- Display technologies - Stereo-immersive displays
would have to present a clear view of the scenes being
transmitted.
- Haptic sensors would allow people to touch
projections as if they were real.
- Desktop supercomputers would perform the
trillions of calculations needed to create a holographic
environment. Another possibility to support these
environments would be a network of computers that share
power.
Tele-immersion will blur the lines between
real and computer-generated images. It will be the ultimate
tele-commuting technology, almost entirely eliminating the
rush-hour drive to work. Instead of commuting, people could
attend board meetings by projecting themselves into the
company's conference room. And if your job requires you to
travel, you could still be home for dinner by tele-immersing
yourself into the family kitchen. Because this technology is
still in the early stages of development, the possibilities
are truly endless.
For more information on holographic environments and
related topics, check out the links on the next page!
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