When it comes to experiencing virtual reality, many people will do so from the comfort of their own home. In some cases, people may venture to a VR arcade to see what all of the fuss is about. Tele-existence is a very interesting trend in this regard, as it allows users to experience virtual reality from remote locations. Having a real-time sensation of being in different physical places will be difficult to achieve, but it is something to look forward to.
Tele-existence and Virtual Reality
To put the concept of tele-existence into perspective, it allows humans to have a real-time sensation of being in a different place. For example, one could live in the US and instantly “travel” to Germany without leaving their home. Right now, virtual reality seems to be the primary technology potentially capable of achieving this goal. That is, assuming a lot more progress is made to provide a realistic environment and experience. Right now, both areas leave a lot to be desired.
Another aspect of tele-existence to keep in mind is how users need to be able to interact with this remote environment. Everything has to look, feel, and sound 100% genuine. Achieving that degree of realism will be very challenging, to say the least. It has to somehow receive real-time information from the remote location. If a traffic jam occurs at the remote location in real life at that time, the VR user needs to experience it as well in real-time.
The concept of tele-existence has been proposed several decades ago. Several patents exist regarding this technology, although no hardware or software has been able to bring tele-existence to the masses. The current generation of VR hardware will not have much success either, although these are still the early days. It would be quite interesting to transport oneself to a remote location and literally walk around like it is the real thing.
Rest assured this technology will come to market at some point in the future. In one way, it will almost feel like we can teleport to remote locations on demand. The bigger question is whether or not developers and manufacturers can recreate realistic real-time experiences. Right now, that seems virtually impossible, but one never knows what the future may hold. These are exciting times we live in, that much is evident.
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