Bell Labs Builds Cheap Telepresence 'Robots' 65
schliz writes "Alcatel-Lucent's research arm, Bell Labs, is building low-cost robots that represent remote participants in meeting rooms. Researchers hope it will address the issue of the natural, non-verbal 'voting mechanism,' by which people determine who should speak based on who most people are looking at. The technology will likely be priced in the 'hundreds of dollars,' rather than the tens of thousands that the likes of Cisco and Polycom charge for high-end telepresence rooms."
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yeah, he just got divorced from Kim Kardashian
Hope the aren't like their modems. (Score:2)
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Can't it be both?
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Re:Hope the aren't like their modems. (Score:5, Interesting)
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" The absolute most difficult part of a teleconference is managing when/how people speak,"
really? then the person that set up the teleconference is not doing his/her job. It is their job to keep everything moving and to cue people to talk.
Plus who does phone only conferences anymore? with videoconference this eliminates this.
Problem is for some reason far end Conference rooms are all in dungeons. Or the executives there ignore their AV engineers and don't install proper lighting in the room and at leas
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Or the executives there ignore their AV engineers and don't install proper lighting in the room and at least a 10,000 lumen projector or use a plasma to overcome the added lighting needed for the cameras.
Thar's yer problem. We have the sensors and signal processing today to not require a TV-studio installation for video conferencing. This stuff is wrapped up in $30,000 gear at the moment, but apply some Moore's Law (and hope against patent law) and we should see video conference gear that can be plunked d
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People playing with the camera is my biggest headache. Leave the thing alone man! I can see your presention if you email it before hand. I can see it if you push the big "Go" button on the remote. I don't need you to point the camera at the projection screen, or even worse, point it at the 50 inch plasma. In fact, I can control your camera from my end if you front the money for something decent.
The mircophone placement is the ne
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I've joined plenty of teleconferences (mainly with engineers, though), and don't remember ever having a problem with just telephones.
I've done a few video conferences, and didn't feel the video was adding anything. Also, often some party will have a video problem, and you waste a lot of time trying to get it fixed during the meeting.
Robots seem like complete overkill. They also don't work when joining the conference from places where you don't have all that infrastructure set up, like at home.
What is the point? (Score:2)
Did you ever take acid? Just hearing about these things makes me want to go find some.
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What do you mean? My trusty Bell 212A has never dro)(*@$#qFw&^h^ +++NO CARRIER
And yet Bell Canada still can't create... (Score:3)
Cheap internet access whithout insane limits...
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...building low-cost robots that represent remote participants in meeting rooms.
My employer already buys these from India.
OK, moderators, cut the guy some slack. Yes, he should have said "...from various offshore locations where under-skilled workers are cheap and plentiful...", but since India has pretty much cornered that market, it's probably not fair to jump to the conclusion that it was intentionally racist.
I, for one... (Score:1)
welcome our low-cost, boardroom robot overlords.
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Could we.. (Score:1)
Re-purpose them to inflict pain on people at the other end of the meeting?
Perhaps my dream of being able to punch people over the internet is closer to being realised?
Eye tracking (Score:2)
It would be more interesting if they created a solution with eye tracking that lit up counter LEDs in front of the people in the board room, or one of the monitors. That seems like it would be far more high tech and efficient, and if done right would be pretty easy to understand/use. It would also work for the remote users - not just the boardroom participants - since they'd have their LEDs light up on remote location when people were focusing on them, giving a good indication that they had the floor to ta
Camera angle issue (Score:3)
Is the robot "face" screen going to be showing the live video of the person's face? If so, since presumably you don't have a Steadicam operator staying directly in front of each human being represented by robots at all times, this is going to look weird. It will be hard to even keep your face in frame as you naturally move around, swivel your chair, etc. Even if your face can somehow be properly framed, the front of your robot face (which itself swivels) will keep showing the sides of your face as you turn to look at various people.
This can be avoided at the great expense of losing the live video of the person--you can just put a static picture of the person's face on the bot, but this seems a big step back from a regular videoconference--you can't see the person's facial expressions.
Not to mention, this enhances a SINGLE nonverbal body language feature (direction of head pointing) while utterly destroying all other nonverbal information you get from a plain old videoconference, including overall posture, hand gestures, etc. The robot can't fold its arms, make a gesture, tilt its head side to side, etc.
I think this idea is quite a stretch.
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helmet cam is the answer
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big bang.... (Score:2)
Anyone else think of big bang theory?
Future of garage startups (Score:2)
The future of hardware oriented garage startups is robotics. You know how Apple and Michael Dell etc. started out building computers .. well that's past. But it's still possible to build a physical product in your garage (besides software) .. and that's a robotic device.
Oh crap - I know what's coming next (Score:2)
Talkie Toaster.
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For anyone who didn't get the reference, it's the most annoying character ever on Red Dwarf [youtube.com] (and that's saying a lot, given the existence of that total smeghead Rimmer).
They need to make them look like well-known robots (Score:1)
Personally, I'd want my robot stand-in to look like Crow. But I could understand some people preferring to have a Dalek represent them.
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I eagerly await the "EXTERMINATE!" emoticon.
And yet.... (Score:2)
We still dont have affordable video conference phones.
How about creating a Video conference standard and forcing the world to adhere to it instead of the fragmented mess we have now?
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obligitory xkcd strip
http://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
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We still dont have affordable video conference phones.
How cheap do you need? I have this Grandstream [amazon.com] on my desk at work, and it does h.264 over SIP and Skype with a full-duplex speakerphone for $180. Runs Linux internally.
Misleading Summary (Score:1)
And that's because this is not a "high-end telepresence room"; it's a "low-cost camera and screen that swivels on a set of robotic shoulders, and sits at a meeting table with physical attendees." Apples and oranges.
Not a replacement for immersive telepresence (Score:2)
From the article :
Bouwen highlighted the value of a “turn-taking mechanism” that determines who should be next to speak.
In person, two people who begin to speak to a group at the same time tend to take their cues from the direction in which most group members are looking.
Those subtle cues are lost in current videoconferences, Bouwen said.
Note the subtle shift from telepresence to videoconference. The whole point of telepresence is that these sorts of cues ("gaze awareness," in the industry) are
Automatic meeting transcription is what's needed (Score:1)
True telepresence at a meeting (Score:1)
Will require a robot that can fall asleep.