UNC Researchers Demonstrate Tele-Immersion 92
bughunter writes: "Researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill have successfully demonstrated Tele-immersion, the next step in virtual reality which allows the live transmission of 3-dimensional representation of real scenes. Don't look for tele-immersed streaming porn just yet; it seems the sheer volume of bandwidth the demonstration consumed caused a minor panic among the Internet 2 gateway admins at UNC."
Grid at B.U. (Score:1)
I recently went over to Boston University for a NCSA meeting on a Grid node. It is like net meeting on steroids. Two large hi-res projection screens and multi-point casting for video. All this just so we can watch powerpoint presentations... It is cool, and in a few years it will actually work.
Even if you are just watching the presentation, you are on camera and have to remember not to pick your nose. Too often.
Re:Who said technology was for the poor? (Score:1)
When scientists work on technology they hardly have affordability in mind.
It doesn't always follow that you can take a "breakthrough" and scale it down.
For example, I'm interested in 3D graphics on consumer hardware. Things are much better now, but a few years ago you'd see demos done on huge SGI machines apparently bought as status symbols. I recall some guy on a SGI training course asking the instructor about a bug in his program running on some big SGI iron - the instructor had to show some restraint, since the program was relying in 100% brute force, and could be made much faster by using even the most basic level of detail and culling algorithms.
I don't intend to imply that the student was somehow incompetent - for all I know he was a genius in nuclear physics or molecular chemistry or medical simulation and just using the SGI as a means to an end, his breakthrough in chemistry or physics or medicine
On the other hand, where is the breakthrough in throwing big iron at a problem like VR? Doom impressed a lot of people in 1993 because they couldn't believe it was even possible on a PC, because they didn't have the right mindset, being used to big iron.
Re:Could be pricey at first (Score:1)
tactile feedback (Score:1)
I thnk you're right, mainly because there are so many sensations that are involved that I'm not sure scientists will be able to create. I at least think it will take a long time before they do, and do well.
Think about it:
I don't like the idea, though I can easliy see how many would. And yes, it could transform not only porn but also horror movies, ad naseum.
Re:Will we get 3D DVDs? (Score:2)
The myth that FTL travel will somehow magically cause you to go back in time is held by many otherwise intelligent people. I have no idea why.
At least one of the four fundimental forces of the universe is instantanious (according to the most popular theory amoung physics people) and quantum communication also offers real world instant communication.
Gravity operates apparatly faster than the speed of light. Research is going on to see if it's something like the speed of light squared or if it really is instantanious. But in no way is it connected to the time arrow.
Quantum communication works by splitting lots of particles into two "possibly existing" pairs, send one of each pair to the "sender", and the other of each pair to the "reciever". Since they have an absolute connection that may or may not be affected by the speed of light, each operates as one bit in a message. It's up to you to work out the protocol - I can think of a half dozen in the time it takes to write this paragraph.
Please ignore misspellings or blatant grammatical errors... I'm jetlagged and just woke up.
--
Evan
Why is Internet2 a EDU domain? (Score:1)
Re:Will we get 3D DVDs? (Score:1)
Re:Virtual reality, the hidden danger (Score:1)
Re:Tch Tch (Score:1)
And by no means does New Scientist [newscientist.com] own a copyright [loc.gov] on the UNC researchers' [unc.edu] results [unc.edu] ...
Main URL (Score:1)
Re:Ignorance, the hidden danger (Score:1)
By the way, do you know why doormen at clubs are called bouncers? Its because when they throw troublemakers like you out of clubs and onto the asphault in the parking lots, sometimes they bounce like rubber balls.
Re:Tch Tch (Score:2)
Slashdot keeps mangling my html. Specifically the closing "/a" tags. Let's try again.
Slashdot [slashdot.org] didn't "rip" that story. It published a link [slashdot.org] to that story. You're making the same indistinction [wirednews.com] that the MPAA [mpaa.org] and the Hon. Lewis A. Kaplan [uscourts.gov] is guilty of.
And by no means does New Scientist [newscientist.com] own a copyright [loc.gov] on the UNC researchers' [unc.edu] results [unc.edu] ...
Re:What's so amazing? (Score:1)
Re:brilliant (Score:2)
Pornography (in its current state) is based on the illusion of the viewer's immersion in a distant environment. The system described may handle this kind of one-way immersion someday (though perhaps on ultra-DVD ROM, rather than on-line) It would be difficult to support mutual immersion in each others environments (as opposed to limited interaction, like teledildonics), even without the bandwidth issue. In general, I think you'll find that true immersion and interactivity would "break the metaphor" of real life in too many ways to ever be useful.
I have a sneaking suspicion Miss November is quite happy she doesn't have to experience her many viewers and their environments. Mutual immersion in telecommuting is, quite possibly, just as undesirable. In the UNC experiment, the remote sites in NY and Philly couldn't percieve the lab, but if they could, it would be unuseful, at best, and confusing at worst. Which environment would they be be immersed in - their office, or the lab?
I call the currently imaginable one-way immersion "Tele-insertion" (no lewd pun intended) because it places one person in a distant environment. In the distant environment, the remote viewer, himself, should have only a limited representation. This becomes increasingly important when multiple remote streams interact with the same office - and each other. Once you make this distinction, and abandon the dream of full mutual immersion, it becomes clear that you might as well stick to video conferencing. Teleinsertion, as an end to itself, is only useful in limited settings, like hazardous environments and exploration - and even then, I woun't be holding my breath for the suitable hardware (yes, I know about all the stuff their doing at NASA, etc. -- *they* can hold their breaths if they like. Not me)
A more "practical solution" might be to build telecommuting home-office-cum-studios that resemble generic corporate office and dress office-appropriate at home (But no one wants to see you in your boxers and the piles of laundry in your bedroom; your client may fail to be charmed by your children playing their usual game of screeming meemies, chasing each other up and down the hall outside your door, wailing at the top of their lungs; and your spouse better not barge into your office, fuming, when she sees the $10K you racked up this month in teledildonics charges)
Sometimes limited interaction is a good thing.
Sometimes more realism is pointless - That's why we don't have CD-quality quadrophonic telephones.
Hey, I'm not knocking these guys. It's research - and I'd venture to say some relatively mainstream communications innovations probably came came out of the decades old (and, as of yet, fruitless) dream of 'a video phone in every house'. But on its own merits, it's hard to imagine why we'd want 'immersive environments' *except* for entertainment.
Re:Virtual reality, the hidden danger (Score:3)
I have worked as a body guard for several porn actresses and they were about as exploited as any other very wealthy person. Not one of them had any trouble depositing their large paychecks. Women in porn know and understand exactly what they are doing; which is taking advantage of the fact that men are turned on by visual stimuli.
If anyone is being exploited in porn it is the lonely guys who buy it. That 'porn exploits women' line is just a bunch of unattractive, jealous, women trying to make men feel guilty for being men. It is a power game and nothing else. Any men who buy into that guff are viewed with contempt by the women who spout it. If those feminists thought they were good looking enough to be topless dancers or work in porn they would do it in a flash; they don't have any 'moral' problems with it - mostly they're just angry that they don't look like porn stars. Women's brains don't work the same way male brains do. What women say and what they do are two different things. Women do a lot of things they don't want to talk about.
Re:Virtual reality, the hidden danger (Score:1)
i thought Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1436...
---
This deffinately..... (Score:1)
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
Shades of The Diamond Age (Score:1)
Want to see a science fiction author who foretold the antics of Microsoft? The Puppetmasters by Heinlein. We live in the red zone.
What, you mean those were aliens, oops, well they could've been GatesSpawn.
Re:If I get one of these, (Score:1)
Re:Will we get 3D DVDs? (Score:2)
Bear in mind that a computer scientist from only 50 years ago would have laughed (wistfully) at the idea of fitting millions of transistors into the palm of one's hand; he or she would simply have had no way of knowing that the microprocessor would be invented. Heck, even just five years ago I couldn't imagine getting more than 56K over my home phone line (...and I can make calls at the same time? Yeah, right...)
Star Trek takeaway (Score:3)
The difference is there's a steady, contiguous progression from videoconferencing to a holodeck, but a transporter requires whole fields of science we have no idea how to tackle.
I wonder how long it'll be before everyone has a holodeck in their house and they just never leave...
(BTW, Roddenberry hardly invented the holodeck. Check out The Veldt [amazon.com], written by Ray Bradbury in 1951.)
Kevin Fox
Ob. Futurama Reference (Score:4)
Re:Virtual reality, the hidden danger (Score:2)
Everything I said in that post is simple fact. I have several years experience working in S.O.B's, (Sexually Oriented Businesses.) People who haven't worked in that industry know about as much about it as people who haven't worked in the computer industry know about building and programming computers. (And yes, I realize that you can study the computer industry in college. I count that as generally 'working in the business'. There aren't any degrees offered in the S.O.B. field; the only practical way to know about that business is to work in it.)
Most people who have worked in the business would agree with most of what I had to say. I've seen women light up when they realized that they were good looking enough to be dancers. I've also had women (plural) admit to me that the sort of feminist rhetoric I talked about is just a power game designed to make men feel guilty. A lot of what women say and do is just to get a reaction out of us. Sorry, that is the way the world works.
Most likely I am the only person in this forum who is qualified to write on the subject. Of course - this being Slashdot - a truth like that won't keep people from expressing clueless opinions.
Supercomputers and Virtual reality (Score:1)
I was just wondering what kind of computers we would use as the core of a multi-user reality machine. Of course it should run some kind of *NIX, the best multi-user operating system? Why should it be win2k when multi-user support is trivial. A virtual environment needs to be a multiuser environment where fellows can interact with each other through terminals, or should i say irc... And supercomputers, speaking of supercomputers, it should be a beowulf cluster running Linux! Imagine nodes working on parallel, rendering photorealistic worlds that changes fluidly, naturally according to the user's perspective.
"The Matrix is a computer-generated dreamworld designed to blind people from the Truth" -- That we are using MS DOS all along.
Re:Could be pricey at first (Score:2)
Are [about.com] you [teledildonics.com] sure [sybian.com]?
FRAG BABY FRAG (Score:1)
Other Virtual Presence Technologies.... (Score:2)
A giant Magnetic Resonance Imaging chamber and sending all the data over as voxels? Of course the colors would be all wrong...
Use complex echolocation (or perhaps with radar?) from multiple transmitters/receivers to create a composite surface map of everything, render on the fly and image-map from cameras onto the model...
for tactile feedback overide signals in the spinal column, mapped for each individual user's particular feedback profile (since no two bundle of nerves is alike)? - not sure how the over-ride would be done, actually.
Have an robotic mannequin linked to a motion tracking suit, like in that goddawful movie FX2, and have it shipped to wherever you want to go.
train a monkey to act just like yourself. your colleagues can train and send their own monkey.
save the money and hire a grad student to do all the on-site work.
alot (Score:2)
I2 is based on IP over Sonet "Abilene [ucaid.edu] is operating initially at OC-48 (2.4 gigabits per second) backbone links. In parallel, we are working with our partners to develop additional links running at OC192 (9.6 gigabits per second) and beyond. When this technology is sufficiently proven we expect to deploy it as part of the main backbone available to all attached members." Abilene is the I2 backbone. So if this one telepresence session required 1/2 of all the available I2 bandwidth... i expect to be able to use Telepresence sometime in say... 2150. I understand further I2 deployment will increase the available bandwidth, but this will take some serious time. Having DSL/Cable is still a luxury - not the norm! At this time, i guess we'll all have fibre-sonet routers in our computer rooms (or whatever).
Dont mean to sound 'down' - but this is tech we'll (average layman) will not have for some time. Unfortunately.
*Before you flame 'yeah its alot.. uhh 1.2gigabits is a tonne dude!" remember alot is a relative term.
Re:OT: audio (Score:1)
Re:Latency not really an issue (Score:1)
Re:Virtual reality, the hidden danger (Score:2)
In any case I've already received the highest moderation possible for a geek. One night I was working with Vanna Lace - who was the reigning Miss Nude World. Between her shows we talked for a couple of hours. She is quite intelligent, and was one of the people who helped me understand women better. Just before she left she said: "Here is my name and home address; write to me when you have your theories written down.
That would be a moderation of:
+10 Miss Nude World gives you her real name and home address.
Now that is moderation points worth having. I'm willing to bet I'm the only geek in history to ever get one of those.
Re:What's so amazing? (Score:1)
OT - Idea! (Score:2)
Imagine a "spherical" speaker - instead of a cone moving in/out in a single linear dimension, imagine the sphere "inflating/deflating". No matter where you were positioned, the audio would always be correctly spatially oriented.
Of course, I'm no audio engineer, so my thinking could be WAAAY off. Anybody have comments?
I support the EFF [eff.org] - do you?
Joel Stein (Score:2)
________________________________________
Will we get 3D DVDs? (Score:3)
On another note, I thought the one thing that killed the illusion of immersion was a delay between movement and the environment's reaction. Obviously, these new 3D projected rooms fix that problem with VR headset latency, but for fully interactive tasks (not just looking), will Internet2 be able to respond quickly enough?
Very open to lawsuits... (Score:1)
Mildly uninpressed (Score:2)
Virtual reality, the hidden danger (Score:1)
Firstly I can honestly say that this is a great step for technology, and it will be of immeasurable use to professions such as doctors and teachers in the years to come, allowing them to operate across vast distances and bring their skills to areas where they are needed.
But the thing is that aside from these important benefits, what will be the main use of this technology? As with everything else, it'll be recreation. The web started as a way of communicating scientific ideas, and once things like the Appropriate Use policy was lifted, just look at who were the first people to move in... the pornographers.
Will it be any different with teleimmersion? Of course not, unless you count the fact that the porn "industry", already worth twice what Hollywood does, will be even quicker this time to get on the bandwagon. Surely a sad indication of our culture, when new technologies are used as a means of exploiting women for the sake of men who find themselves unable to get a wife.
Personally I think that when it comes to something that will eventually become as "real" as the outside world, steps need to be taken to ensure that violance and pornography don't become its staple diet. If you think that television desensitises people, then what will a steady diet of immersive porn and violence do? How will people be able to tell the difference between the real and virtual worlds?
This will become a huge social issue in years to come, and we need farsighted legislation now before it comes an established fact. Of course, we won't get it, but we can always hope.
brilliant (Score:2)
nice one. this person knows exactly what the regular slashdotter will be thinking about first off.
Battle bots (Score:1)
More about teleoperation... (Score:2)
http://etclab.mie.utoronto.ca/ [utoronto.ca]
Researchers here have been dealing with the lag and discontinuity involved in remote operation and immersion. They're applying technology to realworld situations that require visual data augmentation (hybrid, overlay displays) plus virtual control of robotics.
Calum
video projectors (Score:2)
check the picture at http://www
Re:Mildly uninpressed (Score:1)
I hate to say anything but that sounds like statements made by IBM et al earlier on this (eepp... last now) century that computers with decent power would never be affordable by the masses...
Could be pricey at first (Score:2)
"Make sure you get your government mandated minimum daily requirements of PORN today"
Interesting as a proof of concept though.
I *really* doubt that there will be a tactile element to this, star trek gee whiz factors aside.
touch? (Score:3)
Re:Virtual reality, the hidden danger (Score:3)
i'm sitting in my cubicle, (Score:1)
Re:Who said technology was for the poor? (Score:1)
Re:Will we get 3D DVDs? (Score:1)
Re:Latency not really an issue (Score:1)
but I think entangled-particle (quantum) data transmission breaks light speed in terms of data transmission
This a very dificult question with no obvious answer at the moment, and there won't be one until someone comes up with a quantum theory that incorporates general relativity. Even if it is correct, you'd need a very large supply of entangled particles (one pair per bit minimum, i.e 1200 million per second if the other posts are correct).
This kind of thing is a bit far in future to say that latency is not an issue, barring massive breakthroughs.
Re:Latency not really an issue (Score:1)
Re:Will we get 3D DVDs? (Score:1)
Re:Latency not really an issue (Score:2)
Re:Who said technology was for the poor? (Score:2)
Yep. We've seen it before. First the technology was so expensive it could only be seen in a couple of large Japanese cities, but just a few short years later everyone and his kid sister has a "gadget". Gots to keep up with the Joneses, if only for the sake of mutually assured destruction.
This post is made from 100% pure sleep deprivation.
Why? (Score:2)
A better solution is to give every individual a high-quality HMD (with full tracking). Each individual could have their own client machine driving their HMD (each machine would have the model data for shared "room", and model data of the individuals would be distributed across the network). Perhaps each individual has some way to navigate the world, and manipulate it.
Then, instead of piping all this data, just share vertex position information (along with textures, sound, etc), with each client machine rendering the scene for each individual. With current broadband connections, high quality could be achieved easily. Why does all this sound familiar?
Q3A or UT, anyone? Aside from the HMD, it is all there - one just needs apropriate models and skins to more acurately represent real people, as well as some way to share sound (hey, a partyline telephone call could work in a pinch - ideally it would be shared over the net as well). Maybe Half-Life would be better at representing people.
Would it look "real"? Not completely, but we get closer every day on the graphics front - indeed, there are already modeling projects that look damn fine, but incorporation into a 3D engine is ways off (but probably not too far off). And does it really matter how it looks - how real it looks? For some apps, of course - the more accurate the better. But for regular conferencing or meetings, it doesn't need to be highly accurate.
I support the EFF [eff.org] - do you?
Re:Ignorance, the hidden danger (Score:1)
Oh, so I guess if there's a post on murder and rape, convicted murderers and rapists are the only qualified posters. Get real.
It is true that every new media is exploited in polar opposite ways--from Gutenberg's 49-line Bible to Lady Chatterley's Lover. But just because these technologies have the potential for exploitation does not mean we should censure them. Social bandaids do not work--social education does.
S.O.B. somehow seems appropriate for you...
so no porn huh? was: Re:brilliant... (Score:1)
Re:Virtual reality, the hidden danger (Score:1)
Yes they do!
they have more choice than someone in the same position who is too unnatractive to get into porn!
Re:touch? (Score:2)
I don't have the educational background to have informed opinions on issues like this, and I don't have strong feelings on the issue. But I see two problems with this theory:
1. The flaps of your ear contribute a lot to the perception of sound, especially the highs, being more directional. If you are direcly facing, and then directly pointing away from a sound source, you should theoretically hear no difference. (you should get equal amounts of sound in each ear). But try it and you'll definitely hear a difference--the highs will be less pronounced.
2. It doesn't take much signal, especially bass, to get to where you can feel it physically, with your sense of touch. And of course every area of skin is a receptor there, and hence very directional.
I'm sure these points have been brought up before: where does the "two transducers is all you need" camp stand on these?
--
Immersion? Is looking through a window immersive? (Score:1)
But that is only part of the deal: to be really immersed, wouldn't you need to have the remote scene _around you_ rather than through a window? To me, the #1 key to making any kind of VR more immersive is simply put, a larger percent of the FOV of your eyes (which is up to 220x130 degrees) being covered by an image of the scene in correct perspective. Because you don't see any "window borders" anymore, the technique used by these people becomes less vital, and in fact comes for free depending on where you get your image data from.
It is not all that difficult (though correct application requires fisheye lenses and/or 3d engines), and seems to be ignored by 95% of new VR products. It is stunning to see VR-goggles and such that have similar eye-FOV to a 17" monitor at 2 feet (i.e. 30 degrees at best), once you check the specs. Pointless. Their product is much better because atleast you are "immersed at a distance", but it doesn't solve the "full immersion challenge".
Re:What's so amazing? (Score:1)
People have been doing tele-immersion for a long time using virtual worlds and avatars. Scene geometry is normally represented in VRML or some other geometric modelling system. Generating stereo image-pairs from a geometric model at arbitrary points-of-view is easy (or at least well understood).
What these guys are doing is scanning the geometry of a real scene in real-time and transmitting something functionally equivalent to a polygon list plus texture maps to allow the remote user to construct an image from any point of view. As far as I can tell, that's the real innovation.
I see the article defines tele-immersion to exclude synthetic worlds. In my experience the term encompasses any immersive experience that brings together multiple remote participants in a shared virtual space. I don't care who coined the term, it now has a life of its own.
Other people& schools working on this project (Score:1)
The demo that has been mentioned happened at UNC in May 2000. However, do not forget that other schools and sites also took part in it.
The authors of the 3D real time acquisition system are researchers from GRASP lab, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia ( http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~sequence/teleim1.html [upenn.edu]), and while Brown University did not have active role in the system we presented in May, they are very much part of the Initiative ( http://www.cs.brown.edu/~lsh/telei.html [brown.edu]). They are now "responsible" for providing user interactions and having synthetic objects mixed with 3D acquisition data of real objects, so you may want to ckeck project web page soon to hear more about those developments (http://www.advanced.org/teleimmersion .ht ml [advanced.org]). Advanced Network & Services provids founds and their own research staff.
best
Ami
A Better Link.. (Score:1)
Re:Virtual reality, the hidden danger (Score:1)
Re:Internet 2? (Score:1)
Even the bare-bones demonstration at Chapel Hill needed 60 megabits per second. High-quality tele-immersion will require even more-around 1.2 gigabits per second.
Today's FireWire runs at 400 megabits/sec. FireWire 2 runs at 1.6 gigabits/sec (available early 2001). The computer-generated holodeck environment is easily feasible.
Re:Will we get 3D DVDs? (Score:2)
Who said technology was for the poor? (Score:2)
Latency (Score:1)
Re:Latency not really an issue (Score:1)
Tch Tch (Score:2)
PLEASE MENTION NEW SCIENTIST AS THE SOURCE OF THIS STORY AND, IF PUBLISHING ONLINE, PLEASE CARRY A HYPERLINK TO: http://www.newscientist.com [newscientist.com]
For a 'news' site which rips every single story from elsewhere on the internet you could at least be polite.
Counter-Strike as court evidence? (Score:1)
OT: audio (Score:1)
Re:You seem somewhat ignorant (Score:1)
What, are you a left-over from the Vietnam war protest movement? MOST of those women aren't being exploited for money any more than I am at my everyday job. The difference is they are performing a job that some cultures consider to be bad. Many other cultures, however, don't have as many Victorian-era hangups as Americans do...
Re:Will we get 3D DVDs? (Score:1)
Bear in mind that a computer scientist from only 50 years ago would have laughed (wistfully) at the idea of fitting millions of transistors into the palm of one's hand
These are very different things.
In one case (faster than light information flow) you have the ability to send messages to the absolute past.. In the other (transistors on chips) there is no obvious reason to rule it out.
I for one will be completely surprised if FTL communication ever appears, until I send a message back in time to myself telling me that it will happen. Then I won't be so surprised, so I won't bother sending a message back, then I will be surprised..........
Dave
Re:If I get one of these, (Score:1)
Is it that obvious?
Re:OT: audio (Score:1)
Re:Internet 2? (Score:1)
What's so amazing? (Score:1)
FTL communication (Re:Will we get 3D DVDs?) (Score:1)
Because it's easy to show that would be one of the possible consequences, if relativity is valid -- and it sure seems to be.
You can choose either two of:
Quantum communication does not allow instant transmission of information.
Yes, you'll know what's revealed at some other place, but can't send information that way anymore than you can send information by stuffing a yellow paper in one envelope and a blue paper in another (the "entanglement"), then without knowing which is which give one to someone else and tell them to open it tomorrow at noon.
As soon as you open the one you kept (also at noon tomorrow), you instantly know what colour the other one is. But what good does it do you as a means of transmitting information?
Also, "speed of light squared" is total nonsense, so I wouldn't trust the source you got that from.
Re:FTL communication (Re:Will we get 3D DVDs?) (Score:2)
If you can affect another locale, you can send information.
As soon as you open the one you kept (also at noon tomorrow), you instantly know what colour the other one is. But what good does it do you as a means of transmitting information?
Let's say you are going on a nice long trip to Saturn. You want to be able to talk instantly with Earth (you're at war with another group out there... war's good for producing "impossible" or "barely theoretical" tech like radar or atomic fission). You seperate out 5MB worth of bits, leaving one set in a virtual box on Earth, and the other set on your ship (obviously beyond our sota, but theoretically possible - I think it was Cern that has gotten one particle to be in two locations several inches apart). Each bit exists either/both on Earth and on the ship. - until you observe one, and (I'm mangling the physics term here, but it's something like) the wave of probability collapses, and it only exists where you "observed" it. (Observe does not have the same definion here as it does on the street).
Every (l) seconds, you check the next bit. If it is not set (i.e., it has been already expressed as set on the other end), then you know you have a message, and start reading the stream until you hit a "end of message" marker, and then you resume periodic checking.
Your latency is (l), you should be compressing your message (once the bits are used up, you are waiting several hours for the next transmission), and with only a bit more complexity, you can have full-duplex communication. Oh, and the GNU utility to check for messages should be called qbiff.
Also, "speed of light squared" is total nonsense, so I wouldn't trust the source you got that from.
Sorry to imply that was an actual theory - I was just admitting that nobody *knows* how fast gravity propogates. (Interesting that the other person who replied said it was bunk, and then proceeded to link to a reference article that said no scientific experiements have been done yet... of course, he also said gravity wasn't a fundimental force. He must not read even this site [slashdot.org]). It was a "It could be A, it could be B, heck, it could be A squared for all we know" type statement. I didn't mean to imply that there was support to c squared being the speed of propagation of gravity.
Disclaim: While I am not a professional scientist, I have access to several, and pester them about every good Scientific American article or fluffy BBC news piece that catches my fancy. The best scientists look at me funny sometimes, go away, and in two weeks tell me all about the new subject, sometimes with rants about how poor the science was, sometimes with enthusiasm.
--
Evan
Re:FTL communication (Re:Will we get 3D DVDs?) (Score:1)
I'm with you so far.
So far, I'm still with you.
And exactly how did you think you'd be able to see if the bits are "set" or not? It doesn't matter what anyone does on Earth, or if they do it before or after you do something, you'll always see just a random sequence of bits. (And you'll know what the people back home would see if they checked, but so what?)
Re:FTL communication (Re:Will we get 3D DVDs?) (Score:2)
(You Said:)And exactly how did you think you'd be able to see if the bits are "set" or not?
Because half a second before, on Earth, they have set, or not set the bit. It can only exist in one location, and as far as experimental data indicate, that location is the first "observed". Until the observation, physicists use fancy terms like "standing probability waves" to name the potential particle that exists at both locations. Once you observe one location, the waves collapse, and it exists at that location.
If they (to use an old AppleBasic term) keep peeking at the bits that they want to set, and let you set the bits that should be set on your end by your act of observation, then that is a valid channel of communication.
BTW - I'd love to move this to email, mebbie posting the results if I've erred in my understanding. Email me at slashdot@timewarp.org.
--
Evan
Re:Ignorance, the hidden danger (Score:2)
Fiber to the curb (Score:1)
Re:A Better Link.. (Score:1)
Re:What's so amazing? (Score:1)
By coincidence we had a demo just yesterday when we showed exactly that - a miningful mix of "real" and synthetic worlds and two people collaborating in design process. Hope we will have these images on our web site soon.
Re:Virtual reality, the hidden danger (Score:1)
I'm friends with a stripper at the Crazy Horse Too in Vegas, and I was wondering what the clubs there were like.
Latency not really an issue (Score:1)
Apologies for lack of URL - the new scientist site is down right now.
Details about the project (Score:5)
Scientific papers (with specs) at: http://www.cs.unc.edu/Research/stc/teleimmersion/p ubs.html [unc.edu]
-m
Whoa... (Score:1)
M: "Your bank makes it real."
N: "So if I run up my credit in the Matrix..."
If I get one of these, (Score:1)
Re:Tch Tch (Score:1)