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Beam Yourself To Distant Places
The cleverly-named Beam Remote Telepresence System robot lets you move between distant locations faster than if you had teleportation stepping discs.
(Beam Remote Telepresence System video)
[T]he bot is roughly 5 feet tall, weighs 95 pounds, can roll along at walking speed (about 5 feet per second), and has a 17-inch screen. It's got two HD cameras, six microphones, speakers, Wi-Fi, and LED lamps.Fully charged, the battery can power Beam for eight hours of active use. Users pilot the device with Windows or Mac OS X client software and their mouse or keyboard. When done, they'll steer the device into a recharging dock.
I read about this very idea idea thirty years ago in Niven and Pournelle's 1981 novel Oath of Fealty. In the novel, little remote-operated robots (with a screen showing the user's face) called "Arr-Twos" were used to help Chief Engineer Tony Rand see everything at once in an enormous arcology:
Good as the Arr-twos were, with their full two-way communications and their TV screen to show Rand's face, he'd found it necessary to get out and talk to the technicians and carpenters and pipe fitters and maintenance people; talk to them himself, because most construction people didn't like talking to an Arr-two even with Rand's TV image.
(Read more about Niven and Pournelle's robot probes)
Put yourself in distant places with these unusual telepresence robots:
- TeleHuman Life-Size 3D Telepresence
“Why Skype when you can talk to a life-size 3D holographic image of another person?” - Tmsuk Telepresence Shopper Cell Phone-Controlled
In the city of Kitakyushu, Japan, an infirm grandmother was able to control the telepresence shopper robot with a cell phone. - 7 Day Old Baby Meets Telepresence Robot Dad
The (rather good-looking) camo-enhanced device has a live video uplink and responds to remote control.
Via CNet.
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