‘Teleporting’ over the internet
Friday, 17th June 2005
Holy Cow!!
Computer scientists in the US are developing a system which would allow people to “teleport” a solid 3D recreation of themselves over the internet.
Their original plan was for the application to work in face-to-face interaction.
“I’m in Pittsburgh, and you’re in London. How do we make that happen?” Dr Mowry said.
“We can’t teleport somebody, nobody’s going to travel anywhere, but if we’re in our own rooms a system of cameras will capture exactly what’s in each room.”
“That information is turned into some representation - a three-dimensional version of an mpeg [computer video file] - like a DVD,” Dr Mowry added.
“You capture it digitally, ship it over across the network, and then reproduce a physical object that looks just like the original object, and moves just like it.”
And he stressed this would be useful for much more than simple video conferencing.
“It’s very artificial to talk to somebody through a glass wall, which is effectively what you have when you have a screen,” he added.
“You want to forget the fact that you’re in different rooms.”
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