[Image: Eric Paulos’ Personal Roving Presence] “And so talking about “presence” lets us transform the question from “Must we keep moving?” to “can we make moving part of a much larger set of tools, choices that we have for projecting presence?” Or alternately, “how can we combine moving with other things to move less?”

So if you can, imagine a spectrum: one end where we’re constantly engaged in high-energy intensity mobility like airplanes, the other end where we’re locked in our bedrooms playing World of Warcraft. Its in this spectrum where we can create interesting combinations, leverage telecommunications technology to alter the way we move, that help us live our lives more sustainably. As a designer, imagine a dial that we can use to move along that spectrum - as we dial down movement, we dial up telepresence - but never fully substituting one for the other.

And so I want to spend the rest of my time briefly sharing some stories about 3 technologies that i think will play a major role in re-designing presence: virtual worlds, telerobotics and high definition videoconferencing.

Virtual Worlds: The last 5 years have seen the rise of a number of virtual worlds - simulated, immersive online environments that are essentially the 3-d web that was envisioned in science fiction dating back to William Gibson’s Neuromancer. The most popular are game worlds like World of Warcraft, where millions of people are playing incredibly elaborate, immersive and social fantasy role-playing games.

But more general purpose 3-d web infrastructures like Second Life are now being built along an open, web-like model. These are environments in which both amateur and professional designers have free reign to build all kinds of additional functionality and create content.

What’s important is that Second Life has become a place where people are experimenting with new forms of presence: virtual offices, virtual conference rooms, and virtual stores like you see here.

Even more interesting is that real world data and objects are being sensed and projected in real-time into Second Life. IBM, which is really pushing Second Life (so it can sell consulting and private versions) re-created the 2006 Wimbledon center court, shot by shot in Second Life using real sensor data on ball position.

Interestingly, these worlds have real economies, and their currencies actually float and are convertible (Linden dollar is 267, WoW gold is 10.20 to the USD) Not quite as bad for American travellers as the UK!

Telerobotics: Looking the other way, we’re also seeing virtual selves projecting themselves back into the real world.

Tele-robotic experiments like Eric Paulos’ (UC Berkeley, now Intel) “Personal Roving Presence” demonstrations shown at the bottom here - 10 years ago demonstrated the potential of having a physical presence in remote areas as well as a visual one.

This idea is just starting to enter the ‘netizen meme pool, but we’re seeing people hacking solutions like this robot created by a software developer in Nova Scotia to be telepresent in his office of a Toronto software developer. And consumer versions aren’t far behind - the first consumer telerobotic product - the iRobot Connectr, is basically a Roomba vaccuum with a camera on top.

These seems silly now, but personally I’ve found a great desire for this kind of telepresence. With something like this, I could easily participate in the dynamic work culture of our office in Palo Alto - moving between meeting rooms, having water cooler conversations… which I can’t do now because my videoconference setup there, while always on - is a fixed, desktop installation.

Think of it as the personal UAV for the workplace!

High-Definition Videoconferencing: Finally, coming a little back closer to today’s reality, we have high-definition videoconferencing.

What these systems do is use life-size, high-definition wrap around screens and directional audio to create a room in which one side is physically present, the other virtually. Examples include HP’s Halo system, which was designed for the animation studio Dreamworks to support collaborative work over a 500-mile distance from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Cisco’s Telepresence product, which you see here, is similar.

Technically, these systems are mainly about integrating a number of components on the market - high definition displays, broadband networks with good quality of service, etc. In fact, for Cisco, selling the network upgrades for this application is far more profitable than the system itself. The bandwidth requirements aren’t great (about 15 Mbps for Cisco’s system), but there are some funny impacts of how you dress - for instance, if you wear a striped shirt, you completely confound the compression algorithms and dramatically increase bandwidth requirements.

Interestingly, there is also a spec for the room in which the system will be installed - vendors require that you optimize and duplicate the setup - down to wallpaper and furniture - on both sides of the link, to sustain that feeling of “sameness” and the illusion of co-presence. The cost for all of this - about $300,000 per site, or about 30 business class tickets to Singapore. The ROI is an easy calculation.” From The Future of Presence by Anthony Townsend.