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I guess my views on telepresence and its viability are quite clear already: it doesn’t provide enough value today, but it’s a great place for innovations (especially ones that cost gazillions to develop).

So what kind of innovations can come out of telepresence in the future? 3D presence, for instance.

Now 3D video conferencing is cool, but not futuristic enough for me. As with any other technological question, my old faithful place to look for a solution is science fiction. Here are a few books I’ve read in the past few years that had some interesting suggestions on what telepresence will look like in the future.

Rainbows End / Vernor Vinge

Vernor Vinge is one hell of a science fiction writer. I love his books and his ideas. The one that strikes me the most plausible is Rainbows Ends, where he takes our current state of digital communications to an extreme that makes too much sense.

Here’s a piece of a first 3D call of an old person using this “every-day” technology:

“When the phone call came, he thought he was having a stroke. There were bright flashes before his eyes, and a faraway buzzing sound [...]

Robert squinted and shrugged, squinted again. And then suddenly he got it right: his visitor was standing in the middle of the bedroom [...]

Robert stood and stepped to the side, looking behind the visitor. The image was so sold, so complete. [...]

Robert walked back and forth in front of the visitor. He was still boggled by the medium of the message.”

So what do we have here?

• Teleconferencing, as it is termed in the book.
• Based on augmented reality.
• Has some privacy features built into it, but it requires opt-outs and configurations.
• The better CPUs you have, the better effects you can provide (shading, lighting, impressing with your surroundings, etc).

This teleconferencing/augmented reality thing is used through the book in the everyday life of the people; without a need to think about it or prepare for it. This is quite the opposite of today’s telepresence solutions.

Dauntless / Jack Campbell

I started reading Jack Campbell from Amazon’s recommendations, and liked it immediately. It’s a great book about a hero who wishes to be left alone.

While the settings of the books (it’s a series) are in space, as part of a full star fleet, the actual technology being used is a bit of a downer. It doesn’t seem plausible that in so much time from now all that we will be capable of doing is staying in those darn conference rooms with equipment that is too familiar:

“Geary went inside. Desjani followed him into the room, then when he paused, she indicated one seat not far from the door. The conference room wasn’t all that large in reality. Geary had seen it with the conferencing system off, just a moderately sized room with a moderately sized table to accommodate those who might actually sit in here. But with the systems on, as Geary came to his designated seat at the table, he saw it stretching out with scores of seats, each seat occupied by the commanding officer of a fleet ship. Geary couldn’t help staring a little at them, amazed at how each officer looked exactly like he or she was sitting here instead of on their own ships. As his eyes focused on each, their image came close, as if they were now sitting nearby, and a small tag popped up with their name and ship clearly identified. In the center of the table, easy to see from every seat, a large projection showed the disposition of the Alliance Fleet and the Syndics. Virtual image technology had clearly improved during his long sleep.

I guess it’s a lot easier to hold meetings now. [...]“

So what’s the difference here from today’s systems?

• It’s telepresence at its best – including the fancy room and expensive furniture.
• It has a solution for very large meetings (over 100 commanders) – the room expands or shrinks as required.
• It has a presentation control with chair management (same as in today’s systems).
• There’s the added meta-data showing the participants.

I’d say Jack Cambell read the H.323 standards before he wrote this book. I expected more out of a space opera written only 4 years ago.

Star Strike / Ian Douglas

Start Strike is another space opera, but where Jack Cambell decided to stay with today’s technologies, Ian Douglas took it a step further:

“He grimaced. Personal filters were an important part of modern electronic communications. Within a noumenal setting – literally inside the participants’ heads – your personal icon could take on any appearance desired, anything within the programming range of the AIs giving the encounter substance. Filters allowed the image projected into the group mind’s virtual space to be of your own choosing, with apparent dress, body language, even inflection of voice under your control.

[...]

Mentally, he looked down at himself. As usual, he was projecting his real-world appearance into the galactic imagery… which, at the moment, was of a lean middle-aged man with graying hair and a dour expression. He was also naked.

[...]

It was, Alexander decided, a bit like being in an enormous fish tank. The delegates of the Defense Advisory Council appeared in the simulation as small and relatively unobtrusive icons, until one or another spoke. At that point, the icon unfolded into what appeared to be a life-sized image, standing on emptiness and aglow with its own corona. With a swarm of golden icons surrounding him, together with a larger swarm of smaller, dimmer icons representing the group’s cloud of digital secretaries and personal electronic assistants, he felt as though he were a large and somewhat clumsy whale immersed within a school of fish.”

So what’s here?

• “Electronic communications” done within the mind – no external equipment needed, so no peripherals.
• Filters, icons, chair control.

The book doesn’t focus on the technology or the communications, but rather on the actual storyline, so there aren’t a lot of paragraphs like the one I just quoted in the book.

I have added the rest of the series into my wish list though.

Counting Heads / David Marusek

With all the debates going on today over Google Buzz and our loss of privacy, Counting Heads can serve as a reminder of a bleak future. While it holds ideas about the future of security, privacy, user generated content and personal cloud computing, it also has an important component of telepresence and communications:

“On my way to the kitchen I passed the living room and saw that Eleanor was having difficulties of her own. Even with souped-up holoservers, the living room was a mess. There were dozens of people in there and, as best as I could tell, just as many rooms superimposed over each other. People, especially self-important people, liked to bring their offices with them when they went to meetings. The result was a jumble of merging desks, lamps and chairs. Walls sliced through each other at drunken angles. Windows issued cityscape views of New York, London, Washington and Moscow (and others I didn’t recognize) in various shades of day and weather. People, some of whom I recognized from the newsnets, either sat at their desks in a rough, overlapping circle or wandered through walls and furniture to kibitz with each other and with Eleanor’s Cabinet.

At least this was how it all appeared to me standing in the hallway, outside the room’s emitters. To those inside, it might look like the Senate chambers.”

So what do we have here?

• Telepresence will be done by holograms – it’s even called holopresence.
• Point of view will screw up the whole experience.
• People will not share only themselves but also their surroundings.
• The conference size is practically unlimited.

This book holds a “holopresence” call on every other page, with a lot more concepts being outlined. All in all, it’s a great read and an interesting take on the future of videoconferencing.

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If you’re in to science fiction, then Ran wrote a list of such books that you might also want to read.