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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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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In the future, drivers will be able to conveniently retrieve information from the Internet using “natural language.” This has been made possible by a new technology that automatically generates voice applications from Internet information and transmits it to the vehicle via radio signals.

It’s just not your day. You drive by several low-priced gas stations and then, just when you’re on the point of running out of gas, you wind up at a pump where a liter costs five cents more. “Just my luck,” you say to yourself as you reach for the nozzle. But it could all be different in the future. Tomorrow’s drivers will ask their car radio for the locations of the cheapest gas stations along their route. What currently sounds like a fairy tale could one day become a reality. “SmartWeb Vehicle” is the new mobile information system that interacts with drivers in natural language.

While you drive, the system searches the Internet for any potentially useful information. If you want to know which gas station in Dortmund has the lowest gas prices or how many goals Schalke 04 has scored, you can use SmartWeb Vehicle to retrieve this information from the system by means of voice input. Although it sounds simple, it involves a number of sophisticated technologies that have to be combined into one operational whole. The new system is being developed by experts from the Siemens Corporate Technology Division (CT) in Munich and engineers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Device Architecture and Software Technology (FIRST) in Berlin. The vehicle prototype from the SmartWeb project will be on display for the first time at the CeBIT computer trade show March 9-15 in Hanover. The exhibit can be found in Hall 9 at the BMBF’s Human – Technology – Interaction booth A44. Sponsored by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the SmartWeb project involves fifteen partners from industry and research cooperating on a utilization of the semantic web under the direction of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).

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Abstract
Personal Communication with mixed voice and data can be offered as a very rich set of applications, which can be rapidly introduced at low cost. Wireless and positioning technologies in combination with Internet’s demonstrated capability to integrate voice and data are further leveraged by the use of software agents. Our work clearly demonstrates the benefits of providing context-aware personal communication in terms of its potential to bringing about the rapid introduction, at low cost, of a rich communication space where artifacts, people, and non-physical entities are integral parts.

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The Web was designed as an information space, with the goal that it should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also that machines would be able to participate and help. One of the major obstacles to this has been the fact that most information on the Web is designed for human consumption, and even if it was derived from a database with well defined meanings (in at least some terms) for its columns, that the structure of the data is not evident to a robot browsing the web. Leaving aside the artificial intelligence problem of training machines to behave like people, the Semantic Web approach instead develops languages for expressing information in a machine processable form.

This document gives a road map – a sequence for the incremental introduction of technology to take us, step by step, from the Web of today to a Web in which machine reasoning will be ubiquitous and devastatingly powerful.

It follows the note on the architecture of the Web, which defines existing design decisions and principles for what has been accomplished to date.

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A decade after browsers came into popular use, the Internet has reached into–and, in some cases, reshaped–just about every important realm of modern life. It has changed the way we inform ourselves, amuse ourselves, care for ourselves, educate ourselves, work, shop, bank, pray and stay in touch.

This entry is the Pew Internet Project’s contribution to “Trends 2005,” a publication of the newly-created Pew Research Center, a research orgnization that combines several analytical projects funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Taking a look back at adoption of the internet in the past decade, the Pew Internet Projects finds:

On a typical day at the end of 2004, some 70 million American adults logged onto the Internet to use email, get news, access government information, check out health and medical information, participate in auctions, book travel reservations, research their genealogy, gamble, seek out romantic partners, and engage in countless other activities. That represents a 37 percent increase from the 51 million Americans who were online on an average day in 2000 when the Pew Internet & American Life Project began its study of online life.

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