"Teleporting" over the Internet

Yay! It's finally Wednesday! TGIW. Anyway, I'll be going on a 5-day trip to Taipei, Taiwan starting tomorrow, so it is unlikely that I'll be posting anytime soon. I'm really looking forward to it cos I haven't had a break from work and research since January, so I hope to get some nice R&R over there.

Anyway, today's article is on teleportation again. This time however, it's not really the teleporting of someone or something, but the "teleportation" of information and data to create that object.

When long range telecommunications started, everyone was very happy just to be able to hear the voice of a loved one in another country. Then, the digital age arrived, and people started to want to do video conferencing, to see the person live. Now, scientists want to take it a step further, to not only bring video to the person, but an 3D physical model, that moves.

The plan is to use nanotechnology to create minute robots called nano dust. This nano dust can basically be "told" what to form up into. So what probably would happen is that the user would don a special suit that allows the cameras to track his movements and shape. The cameras' data are then processed by a PC and sent over the internet to the receiver's PC which would then tell the nano devices to create an exact physical replica of the sender. Basically, a live 3D moving model that you can touch.

Well, this certainly sound good. I mean I can already start imagining the possibilities of this technology. Imagine movies that you can literally walk into, TV show characters that come to life in your living room, PC games that you can really interact with - a game of Counter-Strike would never be the same again! Haha. Anyway the technology is still years down the road, but I really hope it becomes reality before I get too old to play with them...

Computer scientists in the US are developing a system which would allow people to "teleport" a solid 3D recreation of themselves over the internet.

Professors Todd Mowry and Seth Goldstein of Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania think that, within a human generation, we might be able to replicate three-dimensional objects out of a mass of material made up of small synthetic "atoms".

Cameras would capture the movement of an object or person and then this data would be fed to the atoms, which would then assemble themselves to make up an exact likeness of the object.

Click here for the full article.