April 7, 2009, at 12:37 pm 
The above video is the first video that I have seen of collaborative creation via tele-immersion. Meaning, two people in two different places creating/designing something together in a shared virtual space. This technology is slated to be used for teleconferencing, distance learning, archiving and distribution of physical performances, and training for complex and hazardous tasks where physical visual interactions are the key component. Sounds very Matrix – Kung Fu Training (Neo versus Morpheus) doesn’t it? In the future this technology may also enable the world’s most talented Doctors to converge on a single procedure or engineers to work out a crucial design or even for artists and musicians to come together to perform or just share new ideas. I guess if this technology were to become very mainstream it could be used to simply visit with relatives and friends rather that settle for a phone call or 2 dimensional webcam conference. As you can see the visualization is still pretty rough but it is definitely exciting to see this technology become a reality. More info below:
Berkeley’s CITRIS tele-immersion lab -> tele-immersion
Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization -> VR Wiki Page
Notes from YouTube:
Video of a collaborative visualization experiment between UC Davis KeckCAVES and the UC Davis IDAV VR lab. A remote user from the VR lab is projected into the CAVE using 3D video technology developed at UC Berkeley’s CITRIS tele-immersion lab, and jointly explores a 3D gridded dataset with a local user in the CAVE.
