The Future of Remote Work Feels Like Teleportation
[Philip Lelyveld comment: this is an excellent overview article on telepresence that mentions key players, Oblong Industries, Intel's RealSense technology, Personify, Altspace, and Univ of Penn's DORA project.]
Virtual-reality headsets, 3-D cameras help make videoconferencing immersive
One of the avatars started talking to me, and while it lacked facial expressions, I discovered something remarkable—just by virtue of our both having bodies in a virtual space, I could tell whom he was addressing, and I could even read his body language, as his robot avatar’s head tracked every movement of his actual head, even though it was thousands of miles away and, like mine, wearing a VR headset.
AltspaceVR is in a closed beta for now, but won’t remain so for long, says AltspaceVR CEO Eric Romo. Already, it is possible to bring up any Web page or a variety of three-dimensional content inside AltspaceVR, which suggests all kinds of ways teams might use it to hold meetings and collaborate on everything from documents to virtual prototypes.
See the full story here: http://www.wsj.com/articles/virtual-reality-tools-will-redefine-remote-work-1431299263