This Singapore-Swiss-American partnership that spans three continents will revolutionise human communication in the 21st century. Need to have a conference with others thousands of kilometres away? A glass-walled room lets all parties interact as if you were all together at one location.
Can’t be physically present for a meeting? Send your avatar which will take on your appearance as well as gestures and even give you a report of the meeting at the end.
Sounds like science fiction? Not at all. These are some of the advanced and sophisticated forms of interactive real-time 3-D communication, known as “telepresence” and “telecollaboration” that we can look forward to in the near future.
Taking the lead in the development of these cutting-edge communication technologies are Nanyang Technological University (NTU, Singapore), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill, USA). They have come together to set up a new international research centre for telepresence and telecollaboration, known as the BeingThere Centre. These new technologies are set to revolutionise the way humans communicate in the 21st century, in the same way that the telephone revolutionised long-distance communication when it was introduced in the 19th century.
The BeingThere Centre represents a S$23 million investment (approximately US$18 million or 17 million Swiss francs) by the three universities and the Media Development Authority of Singapore, and aims to leverage on the synergy between the universities, each of which are at the forefront of research and development (R&D) of the technology.
The collaboration will boast a team of 32 top scientists across three continents embarking on joint R&D projects to develop four prototypes of the telepresence system of the 21st century. The parties will share the intellectual property and commercialisation benefits arising from the joint research conducted at the BeingThere Centre.
One of the prototypes that will be developed by the BeingThere Centre is a telepresence room that virtually joins several similarly instrumented remote rooms. These rooms will all have wall-sized displays that give the illusion that the rooms are adjacent and separated only by glass walls even though they in different countries. These "glass wall" displays will provide each person in the room with the correct, personalized stereo view into the remote rooms, giving the illusion that all the participants, local and distant, are in one commonspace.
In another application of this virtual communication technology, researchers will work on a mobile display that brings a 3-D graphical representation of one person in a distant location to a place that is controllable by both users. The display is semi-transparent and will bring the illusion of the other person being present in a room, laboratory or hospital.
Other exciting projects in the pipeline include a mobile robotic mannequin that acts as a remotely located “avatar” that could freely navigate a distant environment and take on the appearance and gestures of its far-away human host; and an autonomous virtual human with memory and awareness capabilities that can take the place of its host when he or she is absent.
Mr Michael Yap, Executive Director of the Interactive Digital Media (IDM) Programme Office at the Media Development Authority said, “As media and telecommunications converge, consumers will start to demand new forms of communication that bring about greater practicality and convenience. With the BeingThere Centre, some of the best minds in US and Europe are brought together in Singapore to partner NTU to push the boundaries of 3-D display and digital communications.
“This new establishment joins a growing list of world-class institutions such as Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Keio University and Tsinghua University which have established IDM R&D centres in Singapore. Together, they will bring out the best of East and West to focus on finding technology breakthroughs to meet the demand of a growing number of users that are expected to emerge from Asia.”
For NTU, new media is one of the Five Peaks of Excellence the university is pushing, the others being sustainability, future healthcare, knowledge hub of East and West and innovations. Professor Bertil Andersson, NTU’s President-Designate and Provost said, “Telepresence stands at the forefront of current telecommunications innovations. The pooling of highly talented expertise and resources will enable us to make greater and faster progress in the fields of telepresence and telecollaboration. This will lead to many positive outcomes, such as improved quality of communication, faster decision-making, reduced travel expenses and risks, reduced carbon footprints, as well as applications for healthcare and medical care. The launch of this research collaboration is also timely and in line with our efforts to establish New Media one of our peaks of excellence in research.”
In the virtual world, there are no physical boundaries. The centre, which spans three continents, is thus headed by three co-directors: Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, Professor and Director of NTU’sInstitute for Media Innovation in Singapore; Markus Gross, Professor and Director of the ETH Zurich’s Computer Graphics Lab in Switzerland; and Henry Fuchs, Federico Gil Distinguished Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill in the US.
NTU’s Professor Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann said, “This project cuts across multiple disciplines of science and engineering as it includes robotics, High Definition 3-D video and 3-D graphics. This is fully in line with the research in NTU’s Institute for Media Innovation and 25 PhD students will be working on this project. NTU’s research will be in the creation of virtual counterparts of real people who cannot be present at meetings. This virtual human will be able to recognise the real participants in the meeting, register what is being said, and report to the absentee after the meeting. This is a unique feature that has never been done, and will make the BeingThere project truly boundless, enabling users to get connected anywhere (telepresence) and anytime (a virtual human can be present at any time).”
“One of the most important imperatives for the research conducted within BeingThere is the seamless integration of visual display into everyday environments,” said Professor Markus Gross, Director of the Computer Graphics Laboratory at ETH Zurich.
“Telepresence will convey much of the nonverbal, often subconscious communications that make face-to-face interactions so valuable and satisfying,” said Professor Henry Fuchs, Federico Gil Distinguished Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill.
In the next 10 years, telepresence is expected to become a multi-billion dollar market as broadband Internet networks and superfast computer chips are developed to transmit and process increasingly intensive streams of digital information.
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