Six years ago, Sybase developer Ivan Bowman decided to learn to telecommute from his home to his office in Waterloo, Canada. Once of the funnier aspects of his commute was a collection of videos he and others developed for the potential antics of a telepresence employee.
Here is the first of four videos that show off some of his humor (or humour for you Commonwealth people):
What a great way to visit the parents!
How can you be in two places at the same time? Dallas Goecker does that, in a way, every work day.
I went to meet Dallas at his parent’s store, Goecker Building Supplies, in North Vernon the other day. We talked face to face and eye to eye, joked with his mother and father, Don and Marsha and walked around the store together. I also took a few photographs of Dallas with his parents.
Funny thing, though, Dallas wasn’t really in North Vernon. He was 15 miles away in Seymour.
Through an ultramodern marvel that Goecker helped create, a Beam Remote Presence System, he was in essence in two places at once.
“Wow, that is amazing,” said one customer at the northside store who saw the robotic-like device while I was there. Other customers were also doing double and triple takes.
“The people coming in this morning seem to like it,” chuckled Don Goecker, a justifiably proud papa.
Read the rest of the article in the PlainDealer-Sun.
If you are one of those who wishes they could help in the next robotics revolution, follow up here and apply with your CV (resume for you Americans!) [email protected]. Be sure to include the following:
Their blog post follows:
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Last week, we were visiting the 3rd edition of the InnoRobo Conference — an interesting gathering of robotics companies showing off their wares to both the general public and various investors and corporates.
Companies that showed off their wares seem to breakdown into five general groupings:
But, in our exploration of the event, one of our team wore their Willow Garage jacket they owned from a previous era. In doing so, a great many people would suddenly come up to us and say “How is everything at Willow Garage?” or say “I heard things are changing at Willow Garage, all good?” After informing them of the former employment with Willow, we asked what was causing such a strong reaction to the change they heard about.
So, a number of things have happened in the world of remote presence solutions — least of which one of our team has been quoted in a recent article in the Economist. Now, check out the quick rundown of interesting articles that have graced our inboxes.
Telepresence robots: Your alter ego on wheels – one of our editors worked the The Economist in this story, breaking down the details behind the burgeoning remote presence market.The technology, which the company refers to as remote presence, is designed to enable communication between people separated by distance but who also want more flexibility in sharing a physical space.
“Video conferencing is cool, walking is cool, so together this is very cool,” said Suitable Technologies CEO Scott Hassan.
In fact, Suitable Technologies sees its competition as face-to-face interactions rather than other teleconferencing services such as Skype.
“With a video conference you’re stuck on the wall, but this is mobile,” Hassan said.
So, been some time on the Remote Presence space, but we are back in the saddle getting all sorts of new and interesting pieces of news on the remote presence scene:
This morning, as we got into the office, some interesting news was awaiting us in the Inbox.
Willow Garage is changing
Submitted by Steve Cousins on Mon, 02/11/2013 – 23:18
Willow Garage has decided to enter the world of commercial opportunities with an eye to becoming a self-sustaining company. This is an important change to our funding model.The success of the PR2 personal robot and of ROS will continue. There are close to 50 PR2 robots in the world and Willow Garage support of the platform will not diminish. And of course, ROS, as an open source platform, will continue independent of our business model choices. In addition to Willow Garage, its supporters include the Open Source Robotics Foundation and all the other contributors in the ROS community (academic, industrial and individual) who have made it the platform of choice for Robotics.
Erico and Evan got the news from various current and former Willow employees, so we assume that other members of the Willow Garage family were surprised.
But for our money, it sounds like Willow Garage is evolving as it should.
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Does your wife know about this?
Is this the real-life Serge?
In watching the video Bossa Nova has shown, it looks like the team took the Ballbot concept and created a much better solution that comes with its own kickstand (or the “rapid deploy safety mechanism” invented by Project Scientist Ben Brown).
In a true collaborative fashion, they have enabled the mObi to support both Willow Garage ROS and Microsoft’s VPL.
From the site, we see that the mObi is 4.75 feet tall (compared to the over 5 feet of Suitable’s Beam) and the screen is the same as all tablet devices.
From reading their site, the mObi seems to be a proof of concept similar to iRobot’s AVA – allowing for others to leverage the device.
Check out their video below.
If there is a chance to test-drive this Ballbot, please contact us here.
At midnight tonight, Suitable Tech’s CEO Scott Hassan unveiled the second version of their Remote Presence System – the Beam.
The Beam itself is not the System, since the collection of components (the Beam remote presence device, the Beam client app and the docking station) make up the entire system. engadget was given a preview which shows the device as Scott has “beam”ed into the Beam. See the video below:
Yes, Mr. Scott – we are happy to see Beaming work finally. The most notable differences in the Beam seem to be:
As we get more hands on with the Beam, we will give you a more detailed analysis of this device and its value for money compared to its competitors.
For now, We want to Beam!
