The Tools of Telepresence in Your Phone
Dr Robert Ballard speaking at the TED conference May 29, 2008
We're entering a new golden age of exploration Dr Robert Ballard told the audience at the TED conference in May. He's commandeered a US Navy Boat, the Okeanus Explorer. "It's mission is as good as you can get. Its mission is to go where no-one has gone before on Planet Earth." He has no idea what he'll discover. It might be the wreck of an ancient trading ship, an unknown sea-life form, or an anomalous geological feature. But whatever his remotely operated robots come across deep in the ocean will instantly be seen in a command centre connected to universities and schools on internet 2.
The tools he's laboured to develop will allow many humans to feel the electrifying thrill of discovery as if they were actually there, not thousands of miles away plugged into a computer. He wrote about the experience of telepresence in his book Adventures in Ocean Exploration. "Now I looked back at the shimmering image, suddenly no longer in the van but virtually hovering a few metres above the wreck, my eyes absorbing what the video camera saw. This was the precious sense of 'telepresence' that I had struggled with my colleagues from Woods Hole's Deep Submergence Laboratory to achieve over the previous two decades."
Marvin Minsky coined the term in 1980 to explain the engaging of the senses with something that's happening at a remote location. This can happen through time as well as space. When Robert Ballard found life-forms that thrive without light or oxygen in the hydrothermal vents of the Galapagos Rift, and wondered how they might have contributed to the evolution of life on earth, he reflected upon Charles Darwin's observations of variations and similarities between animals in the Galapagos region that were the foundation for the theory of evolution.
Minsky made a distinction between virtual reality - which engages people with a simulated environment - and telepresence. Ken Goldberg's Telegarden project demonstrates how people, from a distance, can affect an environment. Over the internet people could direct a robot arm to plant and water seeds and weed a garden plot. Considering Ken Goldberg's telerobotic art and science projects in tandem with Robert Ballard's illustrates what Ballard means when he talks about the most important part of the exploration being bringing home insights gained on the mission and applying them to everyday life.
CONE Sutro project in San Francisco
Ken's created a set of smart robotic cameras that can be controlled remotely, collaboratively by scientists. The CONE project is currently operating in Texas, tracking changing migrational patterns of birds but it was first installed on the deck of the home of Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark, on the outskirts of San Francisco and operated by amateur birdwatchers.
The tools of telepresence are now in mobile phones. In his keynote address for this year's Apple Conference Steve Jobs stressed the GPS location tools in the new, cheaper 3G i-phone and that its operating system has been opened up to third party developers. I imagine that it will be possible to access Outside.in's Radar on an i-phone. In 2006 Steven Johnson and John Geraci started Outside.in, a service that aggregates hyperlocal news by geotagging posts from blogs, newspapers, twitter posts and discussion threads to places displayed on Google Earth maps.
"Radar organises the news in dynamic, concentric circles around you. First it looks for news and conversation immediately around you, within 1,000 feet. Then it searches for stories in your neighbourhood, then in your city. You can set up your radar to track specific places you care about, anywhere in the US."
Travelling to a place, metaphorically, through telepresence is only one part of the equation. Radar gives us a way to bring mentally organise information that's far away with what's close, constantly telescoping between them. It's something Steven Johnson's termed "the long zoom" and that he started talking about in his 2001 book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software.
"Imagine a kind of tracking shot of life two or three years from now, a movement from scale to scale - like the wonderful Charles and Ray Eames film, Powers of Ten, which starts with a view of the Milky Way and steadily zooms all the way to a person lying in a park in Chicago, and then all the way to subatomic particles contained within that person's hand."
