Telepresence â?? a New Way of Collaborating and Make Inspection in Hazardous Environments?

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Imagine how the producers and writers of Star wars portrayed the user of teleporters between locations. The technology enabled people to leave between locations in seconds and be present on short notice.

We have to think that Sisco had this in mind when they presented their newly developed Telepresence Magic to the world in 2006. We have included the YouTube link for you to see this session here; http://youtube. com/watch?v=rcfNC_x0VvE

Telepresence refers to a set of technologies which allow a person to feel as if they were present, to give the appearance that they were present, or to have an effect, at a location other than their true location.

Telepresence requires that the senses of the user, or users, are provided with such stimuli as to give the feeling of being in that other location. Additionally, the user(s) may be given the ability to affect the remote location. In this case, the user’s position, movements, actions, voice, etc. may be sensed, transmitted and duplicated in the remote location to bring about this effect. Therefore information may be travelling in both directions between the user and the remote location.

Telepresence refers to a user interacting with another live, real place, and is distinct from virtual presence, where the user is given the impression of being in a simulated environment. Telepresence and virtual presence rely on similar user-interface equipment, and they share the common feature that the relevant portions of the user’s experience at some point in the process will be transmitted in an abstract (usually digital) representation. The main functional difference is the entity on the other end: a real environment in the case of telepresence, vs. a computer in the case of virtual reality.

Rather than traveling great distances, in order to have a face-face meeting, it is now possible to teleconference instead, using a multiway video phone. Each member of the meeting, or each party, can see every other member on a screen or screens, and can talk to them as if they were in the same room. This brings enormous time and cost benefits, as well as a reduced impact on the environment by lessening the need for travel – a damaging source of carbon emissions.

A good telepresence strategy puts the human factors first, focusing on visual collaboration solutions that closely replicate the brain’s innate preferences for interpersonal communications, separating from the unnatural “talking heads” experience of traditional videoconferencing. These cues include lifeâ??size participants, fluid motion, accurate flesh tones and the appearance of true eye contact. This is already a well-established technology, used by many businesses today. The chief executive officer of Cisco Systems, John Chambers in June 2006 at the Networkers Conference compared telepresence to teleporting from Star Trek, and said that he saw the technology as a potential billion dollar market for Cisco.

Michael Venditte,Vice President of Engineering of Telanetix defines Telepresence as a human experience of being fully present at a live real world location remote from one’s own physical location. Someone experiencing video Telepresence would therefore be able to behave, and receive stimuli, as though part of a meeting at the remote site. The before mentioned would result in interactive participation of group activities that will bring benefits to a wide range of users. Application examples could be sited within emergency management and security services, B&I, entertainment and education industries.

Telepresence can be used to establish a sense of shared presence or shared space among geographically separated members of a group.

The cost of deep water diving operations is extremely high due to safety regulations, hyperbaric equipment, time spent in decompression, and support vessel costs. Telepresence systems for inspection and tele operation for repair and maintenance would realize significant cost benefits and also remove divers from hazardous environments.

Many other applications in situations where humans are exposed to hazardous situations are readily recognized as suitable candidates for telepresence. Mining, bomb disposal, military operations, rescue of victims from fire, toxic atmospheres, or even hostage situations, are some examples.

Small diameter pipes, otherwise inaccessible for examination, can now be viewed using pipeline video inspection.

The possibility of being able to project the knowledge and the physical skill of a surgeon over long distances has many attractions. Thus, again there is considerable research underway in the subject. (Locally controlled robots are currently being used for joint replacement surgery as they are more precise in milling bone to receive the joints. ) The armed forces have an obvious interest since the combination of telepresence, teleoperation, and telerobotics can potentially save the lives of battle casualties by allowing them prompt attention in mobile operating theatres by remote surgeons.

Recently, teleconferencing has been used in medicine (telemedicine or telematics), mainly employing audio-visual exchange, for the performance of real time remote surgical operations – as demonstrated in Regensburg, Germany in 2002. In addition to audio-visual data, the transfer of haptic (tactile) information has also been demonstrated in telemedicine.

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