[AG-TECH] conferencing outside the box

[Andrew Daviel]

On Sun, 15 Dec 2002, John Shalf wrote:

> Funny that,
> does Norbert look anything like the following?
> 	http://www-itg.lbl.gov/~deba/RAGE/images.html
> 	http://dit.lbl.gov/IMAGINE
> 	http://dit.lbl.gov/SC2001/RobotImages

Cool

I actually found the IMAGINE link a little while after posting, while 
surfing for some AG room photos (the main AG site seems oddly devoid of 
pictures...)

Norbert is currently a fantasy; he looks a bit like
this:  http://andrew.triumf.ca/robot3.gif
(apologies to "professor johnsey" - Altavista image search "face" - 
and Johnnie from the Munich Institute for Applied Mechanics).
There's a nice MPEG of Johnnie walking on a treadmill at
http://www.amm.mw.tu-muenchen.de/Misc/Messe/johnnie_april2002.mpg
(20 Mb but it streamed OK with Linux "mplayer")


I can't see the microphone(s) on RAGE - I guess he has one somewhere. The
speakers appear to be on the base rather than below his "face" so maybe 
it sounds like he's talking through his belly button :-) . The camera
seems to be a bit low for eye contact - it looks like he had an 
interesting angle on the young lady at SC2001 ... :-)
But a neat looking machine all the same. Maybe by 2010 the place
will be crawling with things like this.
Does it have any bump sensors etc. or do you rely on the video
and hope for the best ?

I'd probably put the speaker and microphones on the head, but then
you'd need an echo-canceller, and I'm not sure how good they really are 
with only a few inches between. I might have 2 cameras - a  PTZ for
detail and a wide-angle for peripheral vision, seeing as video doesn't 
match the human eye yet.

I have been playing with a camera mounted on a toy car. This is a $150
miniature wireless camera/microphone mounted on a $60 remote-controlled
car. http://andrew.triumf.ca/mobile/ The remote control is binary (not
proportional) and I hooked it to my computer parallel port. Control seems
to work best with timed bursts of "on" to the motors. I was going to run
it over the Internet from home but it turns out the camera and transmitter
use up batteries too fast. It is also easy to get into trouble - it goes a
little fast for 128kbps video - or go out of transmitter range. I'm going
to try a bigger car and run the camera off the car battery. It's really
still a toy, though - no speaker or screen, and way too close to the
ground to interact with people.



The lazy man's robot ... a somewhat bigger R/C car, with a complete
laptop on a stalk. Use  the parallel port to drive the car, plug in
a USB camera or two, use the builtin speaker if it's not too tinny,
and a wireless LAN card to connect to the net. Hope it doesn't fall over 
and smash the laptop..


..gosh is that the time. I should do some work, or get some sleep or 
something..

Andrew