Dear All, You may recall our extended discussion a few weeks ago about the impacts of flying to conferences. I suggested some kind of setup with robot-type devices and virtual attendance, which would offer some (but not all) of the perks of being there. Here is a story about a reported attending the CES conference in Las Vegas via a "telepresence robot." Even though the device is pretty expensive, we usually drop a couple of thou going to conferences, so that would be amortized in a few years (I don't know what the life cycle impacts of the thing might be). And my notion is conference centers equipped with these things, which could be rented for a few days.
Might make an interesting student research paper on the comparative environmental impacts of telepresence vs. being there. Clearly good, if not the best. Hard to drink with these things (unless its an oil bar). Happy New Year, Ronnie Business Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto, for going to CES so I don’t got to By Benny Evangelista <http://www.sfchronicle.com/author/benny-evangelista/> January 7, 2015 Updated: January 7, 2015 5:18pm VIRTUAL LAS VEGAS — As I interviewed a mechanical engineer about a virtual reality headset Wednesday, we both forgot about the fact that I was a robot. Or to be more accurate, I was virtually touring the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas from my home in the East Bay, 500 miles away, using a telepresence robot from Suitable Technologies of Palo Alto. It was a startling glimpse into the future, made better by knowledge that, thanks to Suitable’s BeamPro robot, I’m not going to catch a cold as I have each of the last three years while covering the big consumer electronics show in person. My first experiment in the fall, with a $2,500 iPad-based telepresence robot from another company in The Chronicle’s newsroom, didn’t go so well <http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Sigh-Robot-Telepresence-of-the-present-not-so-5879455.php>. It was sluggish and there was lots of lag, perhaps due to Wi-Fi issues, making the device more of a novelty than a workplace efficiency tool. So I didn’t expect much using a $16,000 BeamPro at the noisy, congested CES showroom filled with about 160,000 germ-spreading people. The BeamPro wasn’t perfect, but after I took a 90-minute roll through part of the Las Vegas Convention Center’s South Hall, I was pleasantly surprised. The BeamPro, built from the ground up with its own video and audio components, let me hear and see clearly what was going on at CES. I could conduct interviews almost as well as if I were there, even with the ambient noise. But even among the technorati at CES, I stood out. “It’s a first for me,” said Michael Chiang of Razer, a company that makes high-performance equipment for video game players. “It takes a little bit of getting used to, but as a mechanical engineer, I love the technology.” There was a certain irony that I interviewed Chiang virtually about his company’s $200 virtual reality gaming headset, due out in June. We might have shared a glimpse of what humans will consider normal social interaction 100 years from now. Yet the basic technology is not unfamiliar. “I use Skype at home to communicate with my relatives in Taiwan, so it’s something like that,” he said. Through my test run, I became one of the newfangled gadgets that people come to CES to see. They stopped me to chat and take pictures. One man said I was the best thing he’d seen at CES. Well, the BeamPro was. “Can I take another photo before you go? This is really cool,” said Maria Tucker of bitcoin wallet company Circle Internet Financial. Joseph Robillard, an executive with hedge fund HHR Asset Management, attends CES to look for the latest in tech. He was fascinated watching me interview Keith Swenson of Pelican Products of Torrance (Los Angeles County) about his company’s new tablet and mobile phone cases. “You’ve already forgotten you’re looking at a screen,” Robillard told both of us. “You instantly forgot the social dynamic that you aren’t here and you’re just represented on a screen. It was interesting to watch how quickly he entered a conversation with you, just as natural as could be.” Once I got used to the controls, navigating the floor was easy because the BeamPro has one camera that points forward and another that points at the floor, with some helpful overlays to help you know which direction you’re going. There were some glitches. It was difficult figuring out where I was in the South Hall because of the BeamPro’s limited peripheral vision. I also had trouble seeing the display of dancing droids inside the Parrot booth, both because I couldn’t just bowl over the people in front of me to get closer as I might in person, and because the camera couldn’t zoom in close enough. BeamPro lost its wireless connection a couple of times. Thankfully, Erin Rapacki, Suitable’s marketing director, stayed with me as a tour guide and helped when Wi-Fi rendered me powerless. But for now, at least, telepresence doesn’t quite replace being there in person. Further limiting its utility is the cost: an “enterprise” level BeamPro costs $16,000, plus $950 for a charging dock and $3,200 a year for support and services. Still, the experience did leave me imagining the day when I’d be able to cover all tech conferences by “beaming” in. * Benny Evangelista is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: bevangeli...@sfchronicle.com <bevangeli...@sfchronicle.com> Twitter: @ChronicleBenny * http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Domo-arigato-Mr-Roboto-for-going-to-CES-so-I-6000349.php#/0 -- Ronnie D. Lipschutz Professor & Chair of Politics; Provost of College 8 UC Santa Cruz 1156 High St. Santa Cruz, CA 95064 e-mail: rlip...@ucsc.edu phone: 831-459-3275/459-2543 web site: http://politics.ucsc.edu/faculty/singleton.php?&singleton=true&cruz_id=rlipsch *"Nothing in the world...is as old as what was futuristic in the past."* (Ben Lerner, *10:04*, p. 152) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "gep-ed" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to gep-ed+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
