Jill Smart, an Accenture executive, was skeptical the first time she stepped into her firm’s new videoconferencing room in Chicago for a meeting with a group of colleagues in London. But the videoconferencing technology, known as telepresence, delivered an experience so lifelike, Ms. Smart recalled, that “10 minutes into it, you forget you are not in the room with them.”

Accenture, a technology consulting firm, has installed 13 of the videoconferencing rooms at its offices around the world and plans to have an additional 22 operating before the end of the year.

Accenture figures its consultants used virtual meetings to avoid 240 international trips and 120 domestic flights in May alone, for an annual saving of millions of dollars and countless hours of wearying travel for its workers.

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TiVo, the Silicon Valley company that introduced millions to the joy of skipping television commercials, is trying to crack a decades-old media dream. It wants to turn the television remote control into a tool for buying the products being advertised and promoted on commercials and talk shows.

The company, based in Alviso, Calif., will introduce a “product purchase” feature on Tuesday in partnership with the Internet retailer Amazon.com. Owners of TiVo video recorders will see, in TiVo’s various onscreen menus, links to buy products like CDs, DVDs and books that guests are promoting on talk shows like “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “The Late Show With David Letterman” and “The Daily Show.”

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The $350,000 scientific display device and its twin backscreen projectors are packed with software designed to impart three-dimensional form and even “feel” to virtual objects, whether a string of molecules seeming to swirl in mid-air, a hovering swath of DNA, or a simulated diseased organ about to be removed.

The 3D objects – which leap off the screen with such forcefulness that first-time observers often flinch or hop backward – can be manipulated to perform flip-flops and other twists and turns. It’s illusion, sure, but not just the scientific version of a parlor trick. The virtual forms enable researchers to scrutinize things they would not be able to easily view or handle otherwise.

“You can go deep into the structure of a chemical, an organism, or even a natural event,” said Zupan. “It is getting interest from researchers into everything from particle physics to how a caterpillar locomotes.”

The 8-foot high by 14-foot wide screen at the Tufts Center for Scientific Visualization, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation and built by the Illinois firm Visbox Inc, is among the most sophisticated such devices in use on any US campus. Boston University and Brown University also have visualization systems, but the Tufts model uses an advanced German-designed filter to sift out “ghost” images and is equipped with twin projectors – as opposed to multiple projectors – for smoother images.

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This story is not a prophesy. It is not a prediction. Nor is it a prescriptive.

This story is a warning.

Reality is changing. Cheap, widely distributed bandwidth and advanced networking technologies are divorcing an ever-growing segment of the population from traditionally “real” constraints like geography and socio-economic status.

At work, your closest colleagues could be sitting in the next cubicle…or on the next continent. Cutting-edge simulation techniques will soon bridge even the visual divides, making you feel like you’re sitting across the table from someone thousands of miles away. Millions of people are already choosing what “reality” they inhabit.

At the moment, online multiplayer games are the most dramatic example of these constructed realities. According to economist Edward Castronova, at least 10 million people worldwide subscribe to an online world like World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies or WWII Online. While the vast majority of these worlds are centered around a videogame (kill the dragon, blow up the Death Star, shoot the Nazis), people are doing far more than just “playing” in them. They are making friends, discussing the weather and politics, getting (virtually) married, even making real money.

How “real” are these places? Plenty—at least to the people who live in them. According to Castronova’s book, Synthetic Worlds, fully 20% of the people who subscribe to EverQuest, a pioneering online game from Sony, consider its virtual world to be where they “live.” They travel elsewhere “occasionally.”

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If you ever participated to some virtual reality (VR) experiments, you know that the environment is quite expensive and not always user-friendly. In fact, in some immersive environments, it’s even possible to feel bad because of motion sickness. This is why researchers from Germany and Sweden have developed a new VR environment where the participants believe they’re moving while being seated. This approach, which relies on visual and auditory illusions, could lead to commercial low-cost VR simulators in the near future.

Here is the introduction of this IST Results article.

Creating close to real-life virtual reality (VR) experiences has proven to be costly and has had rather poor results. In response, a European research team has explored how exploiting visual and auditory illusions can possibly lead to low-cost virtual reality simulators of the future.

So the goal of the POEMS project (short for “Perceptually Oriented Ego — Motion Simulation”) was to move the environment instead of moving the persons. And the researchers presented their prototype at the 8th Annual International Workshop on Presence which was held in London in September 2005.

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An open-standards group has created a framework that could facilitate the global exchange of information among organizations. The naming system could benefit a wide range of disciplines, from disaster response to medical research.

The Open Group’s Universal Data Element Framework (UDEF) has the potential to hasten information exchange by indexing the world’s datasets — from e-commerce services to government registries and medical research databases — in one universally shared semantic repository.

And evidence shows that UDEF works. In October 2005, Open Group officials demonstrated the framework for members of the information technology community.

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Bill Gates was the keynote speaker on the last day of Microsoft Convergence 2006, held this year at the Dallas Convention Center.

Demonstrating what he believes will be popular future uses, Gates showed off a screen for the home that merged a TV and computer monitor. Touching the screen to view news segments from different channels, he found a story he was interested in and touched a button labeled “track topic.” Developments in the story throughout the day would then be sent to him at work or on a wireless device, he said.

At a work scene, Gates approached a desk surrounded on three sides by glass panels. Gates dazzled the crowd when the panels turned out to be one big computer monitor.

“Screens like this will be very common,” Gates said.

Microsoft’s moves to bring software to the Web are seen as an attempt to catch up with dot-com heavyweights such as Google and Yahoo.

“We’re taking the best elements of the online world,” Gates said.

One of the elements he cited was mashups — an increasingly popular way of merging two separate Web applications. The most popular mashups have involved Google’s mapping software, such as a site that combines it with online real estate listings to show users a map of where homes are for sale. Gates called mashups “grassroots programming.”

Gates also touted Vista, the next version of Microsoft’s operating system. Gates said users will be amazed by how well-designed Vista is. Microsoft, he said, has tested ideas with focus groups to find out what users want out of the next generation of Windows.

He cited speech-recognition software as a technology that would transform the world of electronics in the next 30 years.

“Everyone knows when that really really works, it’s going to be a huge deal,” he said.

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U.S consumers bought more Windows Media Center-equipped PCs than the standard edition of Windows XP last month and sales of Media Center will reach 10 million by the end of March, a Microsoft executive said Tuesday.

Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Windows eHome Division, disclosed the sales numbers at a keynote speech here at Mix ‘06, a Microsoft conference aimed at Web developers and designers.

Belfiore also demonstrated the upcoming enhancements to Media Center, which will come out with Windows Vista at the end of this year, saying it will “blur the line between television and interactive video content.”

Sales of Media Center, a higher-end version of Windows XP for handling multimedia content, were sluggish in the first few years of its life, but have picked up as Microsoft has cut prices and dropped a requirement that PCs that run Media Center come with a built-in TV tuner.

Belfiore said that sales of Media Center are now running at 1 million units per month and that the company is “highly confident” total sales will top 10 million by the end of the month.

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Applied Nanotech has signed a letter of intent to enter negotiations for a trial on carbon nanotube TVs with Da Ling, a Taiwanese contract manufacturer.

Under the proposed terms, Da Ling will invest $10 million on a pilot manufacturing facility to make carbon nanotube TVs based on Applied’s technology. In these TVs, nanotubes shoot electrons at a screen to create a picture. Functionally, they are similar to traditional CRT (cathode-ray tube) televisions, which still provide the best picture, but are slim, like LCD (liquid crystal display) televisions.

Trials could begin later this year or early next year, said Doug Baker, chief financial officer for Nano-Proprietary, which owns Applied. Full-scale commercial production could begin in two years. Applied demonstrated a prototype last year. Nonetheless, Applied and Da Ling still have to work out the final details of their relationship by June.

The idea for nano TVs has been around for a couple of years, but the price declines in plasmas and LCDs is making them slightly less attractive. Applied asserts that its TVs will sell for as low as $1,300 when they hit the market. Relative to the competition, that could be high or low, depending on when the nano TVs hit the shelves and how big their screens are.

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As the most influential executives in the telecommunications industry gather this week in Las Vegas for their annual powwow, they’re more likely to be talking about TV than phones.

Several industry groups have formed to push their flavor of technology for distributing broadband and video throughout the home. The Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) promotes using coaxial cable installed for cable TV. Verizon has already said it plans to use technology developed from this group to help lower the cost of its Fios deployments.

HomePNA, formerly the Home Phoneline Networking Alliance, is also pushing for existing coax as well as copper phone lines to carry data through the home. The HomePlug Powerline Alliance advocates using electrical wiring to carry Ethernet signals, turning every electrical outlet into a network jack.

And then there’s wireless, with companies such as Ruckus Wireless adapting Wi-Fi for broadband video. Several chip manufacturers, such as Intel, Broadcom and Airgo will likely be talking about compliance with the upcoming 802.11n IEEE wireless standard, which greatly increases speeds of WI-Fi to deliver new services, such as video.

Equipment makers and chip manufacturers will also be pushing technology that helps bridge the divide between landline and wireless phones. Nortel will demonstrate products for delivering WiMax, mobile gaming and wireless handset to PC video calling. Cisco will demonstrate products that show cell phones handing off calls from the cellular wireless network to a Wi-Fi network using dual-mode handsets. And ADC will show off products using a new antenna system that enhances capacity and coverage in wireless networks.

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