The UB's Event-Lab research group presents BEAMING, a European research project on virtual transportation
The Event-Lab research group, affiliated to the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Barcelona (UB) and directed by the ICREA researcher Professor Mel Slater, has presented the European research project Being in Augmented Multi-Modal Naturally-Networked Gathering (BEAMING), which focuses on the real-time fusion of real and virtual places and objects.
The Event-Lab research group, affiliated to the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Barcelona (UB) and directed by the ICREA researcher Professor Mel Slater, has presented the European research project Being in Augmented Multi-Modal Naturally-Networked Gathering (BEAMING), which focuses on the real-time fusion of real and virtual places and objects.
The BEAMING project provides the first demonstration of technology capable of producing the sensation of being in another physical space with other people. Through a combination of neuroscience, virtual reality and augmented reality (the real-time fusion of virtual objects with real environments), the team achieves an effect close to teleportation. The projectʼs name is inspired by the famed Star Trek command for teleportation, “beam me up”.
To demonstrate the technology and applications of the BEAMING project, the group carried out a virtual theatre experiment in which an actress was “beamed” from the Event-Lab facilities at the University of Barcelona (UB) to a room at University College London (UCL) to rehearse a scene from Annie Hall together with an English actor. Thanks to the virtual-reality technology developed under the BEAMING project, the actress was able to speak and interact with the actor as if she were with him in London.
Through this demonstration, Mel Slater, scientific director of the BEAMING Project and principal investigator at Event-Lab, and Jean-Marie Normand, a post-doctoral fellow at Event-Lab and a member of the BEAMING team, have showcased how the BEAMING technology can be used as a platform for remote meetings. "The aim of this study is to enhance teletransportation technology, to really create the sensation of being and interacting in another physical space," says Slater.
Today, in spite of advanced video conferencing, shared virtual environments, and gaming environments such as Second Life, it is still much more efficient to physically travel to remote locations for business, scientific or family meetings - event if at a huge environmental, energetic and opportunity cost. To address this problem, BEAMING proposes a new form of virtual transport: a remote meeting system based on virtual reality technology that will enable people thousands of miles apart to share a virtual location in which they can interact physically via full-size representations (or avatars) without physically travelling. The effect is achieved by shifting their means for perception into the destination, and decomposing their actions, physiological and even emotional state into a stream of data that is transferred across the internet.
BEAMING brings together existing networking, computer vision, computer graphics, virtual reality, haptics, robotics and user interface technology in a way that has never been tried before, thereby transcending what is currently possible. These technologies are reinforced by the application of the latest advances in cognitive neuroscience, most importantly an understanding of the way in which the brain represents our own body.
BEAMING, launched on 1 January 2010, is a four-year collaborative Project organized under the 7th EC Framework Programme and coordinated by the Barcelona-based firm Starlab, which heads an international consortium of 11 companies and research groups that include the UB and the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBAPS).