Trends: Video-equipped miniblimps may provide unusual info highway vantage points.
By DAVID PESCOVITZ, Special to The Times
Late at night in an empty hallway of UC Berkeley's computer science
building, a blue puffy rectangle floats quietly past the dark offices.
The surreal-looking object resembles an oversized inflatable pillow or a
stray party balloon, but is about 5 feet high, half as wide and rigged
with quiet propellers.
A weary student saunters into the hallway and the object, decidedly a
blimp, approaches him before slowly rising to the ceiling and flying over
his head down the hall. The student does a triple take.
Inside a cluttered laboratory nearby, Eric Paulos, a 26-year-old
computer science graduate student, is hunched over a keyboard controlling
the blimp's motion. Through a small video window on his computer screen,
Paulos sees the student from the blimp's perspective and smiles. The
image is fluid and calming, like one would imagine the view of a fish to
be.
As the curious student in the hall approaches the blimp for another
look, his footsteps echo from the computer's speakers. The blimp is a Web
avatar--aloft, alert and online.
"We're trying to convey the sensation of actually exploring a physical
space," says Paulos, steering the blimp through the lab door and back to
its home against the ceiling.
Equipped with a wireless video camera and microphone--and steerable
via remote control from the Interfacing Reality World Wide Web site--the
blimp will enable anyone with an Internet connection to explore far-away
environments. With a lot of ingenuity and a little helium, Paulos and his
advisor and collaborator, robotics guru professor John Canny, hope
tele-robotic blimps will eventually be commonplace at trade shows and
inside laboratories and museums.
The point of all this? To virtually shorten physical distances and
enhance human experience. "For example, Michelangelo's David is this huge
sculpture that you usually look up at like a little kid talking to an
adult," Canny says. "But it would be extremely interesting to be able to
see this artwork from any view without even having to make the trip to
the museum."
"Tele-embodiment," the official name for the blimp project, was born
last October, when Canny and Paulos were researching methods to connect
the rapid information-exchange of cyberspace with information in the real
world.
Their first project together, Mechanical Gaze, consists of an
electronic eyeball mounted on a robotic arm. The arm is surrounded by
objects in an art gallery, and any user logged into the Mechanical Gaze
Web site is able to rotate the arm and zoom in on the objects on display.
"Mechanical Gaze is very effective if you can fit the objects into the
robot's work space," Canny says. "But there's all this other interesting
stuff we wanted people to be able to access."
The human-size blimp is the ideal mechanical proxy for remote-space
browsing. While ground-based robots have difficulty negotiating stairs
and move only in two dimensions, the blimp easily flies over obstacles.
Unlike traditional robotic amalgamations of metal gears, wheels and
circuitry, if the Web blimp happens to knock into an object or person, it
simply bounces right off.
Canny and Paulos predict that with the right commercial interest, the
blimp could go to market within two years at a cost of $400--a third of
the price of their first prototype. In the meantime, though, the
scientists are adding features such as stabilizing mechanisms and a
remote-controlled rotating laser pointer. The most exciting imminent
feature is the attachment of a liquid crystal display screen and speakers
so the user can be seen and heard by those who interact with the blimp.
"We definitely don't want this thing to look like a cheesy inflatable
person," Paulos is quick to note when discussing this latest application.
"But facial expressions are extremely important in conversation."
While virtual reality researchers are busy creating new environments
in silicon, Canny and Paulos are exploring the physical world we already
have. Their R&D agenda is simple: If you can't bring Muhammad to the
mountain. . . .
"Reality is still where the action is," Canny says. "That's where we
live. We're just extending the possibilities for normal modes of human
interaction at a distance."
The two have other projects on the drawing board, including a computer
vision device that would "watch" its user's placement of objects in
closets or drawers for easy relocation later. But tele-robotics is still
at the forefront of their imaginations, and Paulos is already scribbling
down plans that will take tele-presence to the next level, where robotics
could create the sensation of physical contact over the Net.
David Pescovitz is the technology editor for Spiv (www.spiv.com), a
youth culture Web site from Turner Entertainment. He can be reached at
pesco@well.com. The Web blimp and the Mechanical Gaze projects can be
found at http://vive.cs.berkeley.edu
Copyright Los Angeles Times