Far away yet strangely personal: Telepresence without trompe l’oeil

The Economist has an article on “telepresence” systems - high-end teleconferencing setups designed to fool the brain into thinking you’re in the same room as the people you’re talking to.

As well as using very expensive high-definition TV and recording systems, they do things like matching the wallpaper in the rooms at either end. I can imagine these kind of systems would work well at locations that are geographically relatively close - like across the US or Europe - with low latency, ferociously fast internet connections and top-of-the-range technical support. But if anything goes even slightly wrong - a slight lag between seeing someone’s lips move and hearing them speak, the video or audio pausing for a few seconds - the brain will figure out the illusion and the feeling of presense will disintegrate. That’s presumably why:

“HP charges $350,000 for every room it kits out for telepresence and, in America, a further $18,000 a month for service. Cisco charges up to $299,000 per room.”

The rest of us, though, need a way of tricking the brain into thinking it’s there that doesn’t rely on exactly recreating the visual experience that we’d be getting if we were in the same room.

We need to replace a physical space with an artistic space; Abstract out the information we really want, and let the brain skip over the stuff it doesn’t need to care about (like the colour of the wallpaper). We do this by going in precisely the opposite direction to HP and Cisco: Replace the detailed reality we’re used to with a space full of visual and linguistic metaphors.

Here’s a space Jeremy Kemp had rigged up for the pre-conference SLCC meeting in Chicago. A bunch of people involved in developing tools for virtual worlds - including our own project, Sloodle - were there in the room, and representatives from Blackboard and Angel Learning were attending the meeting via Second Life.

(Part of this session is also available as a YouTube.)

You can’t see it in the picture, but two of the four walls in the room were projecting images of the shared space in Second Life, shown by different avatars standing at different angles. That helps make the people in the room feel like their part of the shared virtual space.

Of course there are limits to how far this approach can take you - which is why I flew out to Chicago in the first place. And I think the range of expressions that we’re getting with Second Life avatars still leaves a lot to be desired. What’s particularly tricky is the subconscious body language and facial expressions that nobody is going to type, even if they had a gesture for it.

The feeling of presence virtual worlds can give us right now is very powerful, and it’s getting better all the time. But to really make friends with someone a long way off, you still need to get on a plane.

And I bet that’s true even if you have $350,000 to spend on a telepresence room.