Latest Internet toy: live viewing
Jason Romney (jromney@werple.mira.net.au)
Sun, 14 Jan 1996 12:06:34 +1100
Latest Internet toy: live viewing
> __________________________________________________________________________
>
> (c) 1995 Copyright The News and Observer Publishing Co.
> (c) 1995 Cox News Service
>
>
>
> ATLANTA (Oct 21, 1995 - 00:06 EDT) -- Steve Mann is used to people
> watching as he lunches with friends or rides his bike along Boston's
> Charles River. At any given moment, dozens of people may be seeing the
> world exactly as he does.
>
> Steve Mann? Oh, he's the guy running around MIT who looks a little
> like Batman -- the one with the video camera on his face and an
> antenna poking up above his head.
>
> Lately, computer users on six continents have been seeing the world
> through Mann's eyes. His "wearable wireless webcam" provides anyone
> logged on to his Internet home address with live views of his daily
> routine.
>
> "Sometimes women ask me to give them a safe escort back to the dorm,"
> he says. "If we really want safer streets, maybe we should distribute
> cameras like this to everyone."
>
> In addition to having a little fun, the experiment by MIT's Media Lab
> has a serious side. Someday, Mann says, wearable videocams could
> become personal safety devices. Electronic eyeglasses like his could
> help the wearer -- or an audience in cyberspace -- see better at night
> or zoom in on distant objects to see them better.
>
> If it sounds like the distance between cyberspace and the real world
> is shrinking, consider some of the other things being attached to the
> Internet these days:
>
> There's an active volcano in New Zealand, a hot tub in Ypsilanti,
> Mich., the 18th hole at Maui's Silversword Golf Course, and a bus stop
> in Beverly Hills. There's an Internet ant farm, a Chia pet, a parrot
> named Cujo, an iguana named Dupree and an ever-growing number of
> tropical fish tanks.
>
> The Net is sprouting eyes. And ears. And vending machines, hot tubs,
> coffeepots, robot gardeners and model railroads. The armada of devices
> plugged into the Internet, in fact, is transforming the network into a
> bizarre place that falls somewhere between George Orwell's "1984" and
> "Candid Camera" run amok.
>
> "A year ago, there were only a few devices connected to the Internet,"
> says Anthony Anderberg, a computer science student at Dakota State
> University who is tracking the trend. "But the number of devices is
> just exploding. The uses for these things are as diverse as a person's
> imagination."
>
> The first device known to be connected to the Internet was a toaster
> that was plugged in at a computer trade show in 1990. Soon, you could
> also check the status of Coke machines, a coffeepot and a Christmas
> tree.
>
> As a practical matter, scientists and engineers see real advantages to
> what is known as telepresence -- "being there" without really being
> there. NASA, of course, routinely guides spacecraft millions of miles
> away, but the Internet offers rudimentary telepresence for the masses.
>
> Astronomers at the University of Georgia and three other Southeastern
> universities now operate a 30-inch robot telescope on a mountain in
> Arizona without ever leaving their offices. Internet users can access
> government data buoys in the middle of the ocean to check local wind
> and wave conditions.
>
> When New Zealand's Mount Ruapehu blew its top last month, scientists
> flocked to the mountain for a look at the eruption. Within a day,
> however, a camera set up in a resort manager's living room at nearby
> Whakapapa Village brought the volcano to the world. And it's still
> transmitting.
>
> Californians can now track streamflow in remote rivers from
> instruments connected to the Internet. And anyone on the World Wide
> Web can access a battery of "weathercams" enabling them not only to
> check local forecasts but to actually "see" the weather in 50 U.S.
> locations from Atlanta to Vail, Colo.
>
> But as devices have proliferated, imaginative applications of
> telepresence technology have attracted a huge following among
> rank-and-file Internet users.
>
> More than 25,000 Internet users a day, for instance, tap into the
> University of Ulm, Germany, where they take turns running the
> Internet's first model train. A video camera provides a slightly jerky
> view of three trains as they race around the oval track.
>
> Since April, more than 1.9 million people -- including doctors,
> engineers and stockbrokers -- have taken a few minutes out of the day
> to play with the trains. Heiner Wolf of the university's computer
> science department says so far there's only been one mishap. The
> trains derailed because his department laid the tracks wrong.
>
> And at the University of Southern California, more than 2,500 people
> have joined an Internet "garden club" that allows them to use a
> one-armed robot to tend a small indoor garden. Members are assigned a
> fixed point in the tabletop garden where they can plant a seed and
> water it -- one teaspoon at a time.
>
> Ken Goldberg, a robotics specialist, says the gardening project is as
> much an experiment in sociology as engineering. The researchers wanted
> to see how Internet users, notorious for their short attention spans,
> would deal with something that requires patience and sustained
> interest.
>
> "Many parts of the Internet are still kind of like the raw frontier,"
> he says. "We wanted to see what kind of community ethic would develop
> around something like the garden."
>
> Goldberg is pleased that after six months the garden is rife with
> petunias, peppers, eggplants and other vegetation, even though the
> people tending it are often thousands of miles away and can see it
> only through the video eye of the robot gardener.
>
> "We have a village square where members of the club swap e-mail about
> their gardening experiences and even adopt plants that other people
> have abandoned," he says.
>
> With 2,500 member gardeners and 23,000 onlookers, the biggest
> challenge has been the lack of room to plant seeds.
>
> Given the groundswell of interest, the day may not be so far off when
> people water their own plants from afar. Maybe they'll even figure out
> a way to feed the cat and walk the dog via the Internet.