Working Remotely, Robots In Place
from the sounds-pointless dept
It appears that the folks at HP Labs, who are working on their "far out" projects have been working overtime to get some publicity lately. Last week, there was an article about their photography system that was designed to figure out the best pictures as you walked around, and just take them. This week, there's an article about a new "surrogate robot" that they're working on to let people attend meetings remotely. They say it's not really a robot since it's fully controlled by a human being - who has to sit in a specially designed box with lots of monitors and controls to handle the robot. The robot, itself, displays the the face of whoever is controlling the surrogate, and (in theory) lets them interact better with whoever they're meeting with. This sounds like a very expensive solution to a fairly small problem. These days, most people are quite comfortable handling meetings via phone or web, so adding a special robot and a special robot control room, seems a bit excessive.
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