At Cisco's Networkers 2006 event in Las Vegas, CEO John Chambers demonstrated telepresence, video telephony, interactive TV, and other futuristic network applications that Cisco plans to offer. This video on Silicon Valley Sleuth shows the new apps in the context of a sports broadcast.
What's the easiest way to publish your video to the Internet? It doesn't get much easier than this: Download the free, award-winning video phone/video conference/video mail software from SightSpeed, then call SightSpeed and leave the company a video message. (If necessary, watch the video-creation demo first.) Callers' messages -- or some of them, anyway -- are posted on SightSpeed's site. Check out this musical tribute to SightSpeed:
EWAN 1 Inc. is planning to make cable companies obsolete. With its forthcoming products and content partnerships, the company hopes to offer an a la carte television service over the Internet, comparable to what cable and satellite companies are providing, but for about one third the price. Now you can see a demonstration of some of EWAN's technology. (Requires Windows Media Player.)
Videocameras, some of them tethered to research vessels, are going where humans can't, and scientists with high-speed connections can now operate them from the laboratory. In one project, a seafloor robot is exploring underwater volcanoes off the Pacific coast; the high-definition video stream is uplinked to satellite, downlinked at the University of Washington, and sent over high-bandwidth connections to researchers and students. Another camera, shown above, is being used to study mantas, large tropical fish that inhabit the waters around Hawaii, after a three-month tryout at California's Monterey Bay Aquarium. Registering with The Manta Network may get you a chance to control the camera, though that function doesn't seem to be working right now.
The Internet offers a wider selection of piano teachers than you can find in your immediate neighborhood. MusicPath software developed at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada, lets you connect your digital acoustic piano to your teacher’s piano. When you play, the piano in your teacher’s office is activated in real time; in the same way, your teacher’s playing is reproduced on your piano. Web cameras and videoconferencing software complete the picture.
Scientists at Australia's national science agency developed a “haptic workbench” that is used for surgical training, among other applications. Multiple trainees, operating over the network on a virtual “patient,” can interact with the patient and with each other at the same time. Trainees can not only see but also feel what others are doing. For example, if two participants, in different locations, grasp opposite sides of a virtual surgical tool, each one can feel the other pulling on it. The technology is now marketed by Reachin Technologies AB in Sweden.
Get ready to place your bid online -- and we don’t mean on eBay. With a high-speed connection, you can now take part in live auctions – the kind where the auctioneer sounds like a speeded-up recording and any twitch can signal a bid. By logging onto a cattle-auction site, for example, you could become the proud owner of an Angus bull or a herd of buffalo. You can view the auctions over a 256 kbps Internet connection, but if the object is to get your bid in ahead of the other participants, higher speeds might be helpful.