Instantaneous Beaming to Distance Places –A Possible and Desirable Future?
Anthony Steed

Doron Friedman

Greg Welch

Mel Slater

Susumu Tachi

University CollegeLondon (UCL), UK

IDC H, Herzliya,
IsraelUniversity of Central
Florida, USA

ICREA-University ofBarcelona, Spain

University of Tokyo,
JapanAIMS
We imagine a possible future where everywhere that people live
there will be humanoid robots for rent. Instead of physically
visiting a remote place people will have the option of going online, selecting a place, hiring such a robot, and then embodying itin order to carry out tasks and interact with local people there. If
we think of the center of consciousness as the location at which
we are aware of perceiving multisensory information that locates
us in space, then effectively we transfer our consciousness into thebody of the robot: a kind of ‘beaming’ of the self from one place
to another.
Beaming means instantaneous transportation of our body to aphysically remote place. Today we can clearly beam digital
representations of ourselves through video conferencing or
collaborative virtual environments. However, it is also possible tobe represented in physical form in a remote location throughcombining virtual reality and robotic telepresence/telexistence
techniques. The beamer, for example, wears a head-mounted
display (HMD), including real-time motion capture, and devices
for physiological capture including electrical brain signals. Insteadof beaming the physical body to the remote environment (thedestination), his or her actions and dynamic state - movements,
voice, physiology, and electrical brain activity - are transmitted
across the internet in order to control a remote humanoid robot in
the destination. The beamer sees the remote destination in wide
field-of-view stereo through cameras mounted as the eyes of therobot that transmit augmented video back to the HMD, andsimilarly sounds, touch and force or even odors from the remoteenvironment are transmitted to the beamer. Thus the beamer isphysically present in the remote environment and can interact
with the local people there.
This panel will explore how this technological setup can beachieved, examples of its use, and also look to future
developments. Anthony Steed will concentrate on collaboration
using such beaming technologies and the implications ofasymmetric access to the common space that is supported.
Susumu Tachi will introduce a telexistence avatar called
TELESAR V, which enables a beamer to have a physical avatar
body in a remote environment where he or she is beamed down
and to interact with the environment using the avatar body as hisor her own body. Doron Friedman shows how actions of therobot can be accomplished through a brain-computer interface
rather than rely on motion capture. Greg Welch will look at somefactors affecting local (self) and remote (with others) presence ofthe beamer. Mel Slater will moderate the panel introducing how
the beaming concept has already been used in news reporting.
Each speaker will present an opening statement and pose anumber of challenges to the participants and audience, in the first
30 minutes, followed by debate. The session will revolve aroundthe motion: Beaming is technologically possible in the medium
future and will positively benefit society. Speakers for and against
this motion will be solicited.

1 MODERATOR: melslater@ub.edu
Mel Slater is an ICREA Research Professor at the University ofBarcelona and part-time Professor of Virtual Environments atUCL. He has been involved in research in VR since the early
1990s. He was awarded the IEEE VR Career Award in 2005, andrecently completed a European Research Council Advanced Grant
on VR. He is Field Editor of Frontiers in Robotics and AI. He has
contributed to the scientific study and technical developments ofVR and to the use of VR in other fields, notably psychology andthe cognitive neuroscience of how the brain represents the body.
2 PANELIST: ANTHONY STEED a.steed@ucl.ac.uk
Anthony Steed is Head of the Virtual Environments andComputer Graphics (VECG) group at University College London.
Prof. Steed's research interests extend from virtual reality systems,
through to mobile mixed-reality systems, and from systemdevelopment through to measures of user response to virtualcontent. He has worked extensively on systems for collaborative
mixed reality. He is lead author of a review textbook “NetworkedGraphics: Building Networked Graphics and Networked Games”.
He was the recipient of the IEEE VGTC’s 2016 Virtual Reality
Technical Achievement Award.
3 PANELIST: DORON FRIEDMAN doronf@idc.ac.il
Doron Friedman is the head of the Advanced Reality Lab(http://avl.idc.ac.il) in the Interdisciplinary Center (Israel). Dr.
Friedman has been a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in theComputer Science Department in University College London,
where he carried out some of the earliest work on controlling
virtual reality and avatars by ‘thought’ using brain computerinterfaces. Doron has a few dozen publications in peer reviewed
journals and conferences in the areas of brain computer interfaces,
human-computer interaction, and virtual reality. Doron is the coauthor of several patent applications and has been involved insetting up several startup companies.
4 PANELIST: GREG WELCH welch@ucf.edu
Greg Welch is the Florida Hospital Endowed Chair in Healthcare
Simulation at the University of Central Florida in the College ofNursing, the Department of Computer Science, and the Institutefor Simulation & Training. He is also an Adjunct Professor at theUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests
include human-computer interaction, virtual and augmentedreality, human motion tracking, and telepresence. He has been inacademia since 1992, having previously worked for NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory (Caltech) and the Northrop Corporation.
He currently serves on several editorial boards and has co-chairedmultiple associated conferences.
5 PANELIST: SUSUMU TACHI tachi@tachilab.org
Susumu Tachi is Professor Emeritus of The University of Tokyo,
where he currently leads several research projects on telexistence,
virtual reality and haptics, including ACCEL Embodied Media
Project at Tachi Laboratory, Institute of Gerontology. In 1980, Dr.
Tachi invented the concept of Telexistence, which enables ahighly realistic sensation of existence in a remote place without
any actual travel, and has been working on the realization oftelexistence since then. Other achievements include HapticPrimary Colors, Optical Camouflage, and autostereoscopic VR
displays such as TWISTER, Repro3D and HaptoMIRAGE. He
was the recipient of the 2007 IEEE Virtual Reality Career Award.