In the fall on 1981 I wrote a class paper for SFSU about a futuristic multimedia event which involved the live holographic replay of the first human moon landing within the confines of St. Peter's square in Rome.
I imagined this to be a live, public event that was taking place in the middle of the night, during a major sacred celebration (like ChristmasÂ’ Eve or Easter) with thousands of people participating there and remotely with their personal media receivers.
The objective of the class paper was, from what I recall, to create a live, disruptive artistic event that would move people into seeing things differently than what they have been accustomed to. The class I was attending was part of a very disruptive departmental project called CEIA or Center of Experimental and Interdisciplinary Arts.
I still have this paper somewhere and nonetheless the time passed (over 20 years) I still feel the fascination with this story as I had written it today.
But from then to today, things have progressed a lot in the way that will make it possible for us to create spectacular events which are half "projected" and half real.
One great example of this future potential is well captured by Roland Piquepaille, a technology reporter that focuses on breaking news stories that touch the bleeding edge of where new technologies are taking us.
In his latest stroll out into the future Roland Piquepaille reports about tele-immersion:
"Tele-immersion is a technology which allows cooperative interaction between groups of distant people working in the same virtual environment.
At the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley, interdisciplinary teams are deploying [2]this technology. It involves three real-time steps: taking images of a subject with 48 cameras, transmitting the images over a network, and implanting them in a virtual world.
For example, it will allow students and professors on different campuses to meet -- virtually -- and discuss -- lively -- while being in ancient sites of Greece or Italy.
The technology offers more promises than academics discussions.
Imagine a nurse telling a diabetic how to make an insulin injection while being far away from him.
Of course, this technology is facing some hurdles, such as the cost involved to model you with so many cameras.
This summary shows you some details about the image processing involved in this project."
Outside high-budget academic research projects like this one, I saw also some effective grassroots attempts at this, and one in particular comes up to mind: Reality Fusion Immersive Game software, which allowed webcam users to immerse themselves into a fake scenario while playing or interacting with it.
I still have a copy of that great software and it remains definitely a prototype much ahead of its time. It was originally bundled with Logitech Webcams and some of you may still find it inside the original CD that came with it.
Check out Roland's original reporting on this and his unique technology-related take on the future.
Fascinating stuff.
