BEING VIRTUALLY THERE

Some time ago, on a Friday afternoon, I decided I needed a vacation. 

One of my favorite places here in California is Lake Tahoe. It is in the mountains a few hours east of my home in the San Francisco area. There are several ways to get there. All of them take you on some busy California freeways. These can get congested at times; pick the wrong route and you can add an hour or more to your drive. 

Fortunately, I could connect to video cameras on the Internet (also called  netcams or webcams) that looked over the critical points on my route. You can, too, if you’d like. Just be aware that the images may take a few minutes to load if you have a slow connection: 
PIXPage Traffic

There are, of course, many other traffic cameras that let you be "virtually there" before you and your car get committed to a physical presence. Here is a site to help you find one in your area:
Virtual Web Cams: Traffic
 

The Netcam Connection

In the Dilbertian company where I used to work, we had to fill sign-out forms hanging outside our cubicles whenever we stepped away. Also, since the company wanted to be, as management put it, "competitive", this meant a prodigious consumption of coffee by the "team". 

The trips to the coffee room at the other end of the building were particularly tedious: we had to fill the form, walk to the coffee room, find out the pot was empty, start a new brew, walk back to the cubicle, sign in, do some work, fill the form again, walk back to the coffee room, find out that the coffee we had brewed had been drunk, walk back, sign in…after a while we wished we could just peek into the coffee room without leaving our cubicle. 

Faced with a similar problem (staircases rather than sign-out forms), the scientists at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory did something about it. Back in 1991, before most of us had heard of the Web, they pointed a surplus video camera at the coffee machine, connected the camera to a frame grabber, and made the image available to every workstation in the lab. Later, they moved the image to the Web. You can still see it at the Trojan Room Coffee Machine site.

There followed many other applications of Internet cameras as a way to look at real-world locations. Here’s a selection to whet your appetite:

Look at the most up to date weather images of our planet:
Live Weather Images

Take a virtual journey around the world (caution-some sites may be slow): 
Around the World in 80 Clicks

Look over the shoulder of scientists in some of today’s foremost labs. Watch work in eye surgery, electron microscopy, and more: 
Virtual Web Cams: Labs
 

Being Interactive

Those sites are fun and interesting. If you are like me, however, you probably prefer being more than just a passive observer. You’d like something you can interact with-something you can do to the remote site. 

Several of the netcams are "telerobotic"; you can control the view. Perceptual Robotics offers a nice collection of these.  The sites include sports, shopping, and science venues. You can select pan, tilt, and zoom to compose your shots. 

The Interactive Art Museum at the University of Southern California is a different experience. This telerobotic camera can move around the Drinking Maiden sculpture. It gives you a wider range of views than you’d get being in the same room! 

Some telerobots are not cameras themselves; rather, a camera is used to monitor the control of a robot on the Web. One of the best is the Telegarden which at present is on exhibition in Austria. Using this telerobot and the netcams, you can plant, water, and monitor the growth of a garden. Another telerobot, working with blocks,  can be found at Australia's Telerobot on the Web. The controls on these are fairly sophisticated, and it takes a bit of practice to become an accomplished teleoperator. 

After becoming familiar with these, you may want to go on to more serious scientific study. Some instruments, mostly telescopes, are offered for use by netizens. If you are an amateur astronomer, take a look at these:

Bradford -Robotic -Telescope in West Yorkshire, England

UCSB Remote Access Astronomy at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Both these sites are for serious students: you are asked to submit an observation request to control and point the telescope. 

We can expect to see more scientific and industrial experiments in Web-based telepresence. 

To Explore Further…

I hope this has given you a sample of how you can be "virtually there" at places all over the planet. We’ve just begun, though. There are many, many sites to explore. The great thing about Web telepresence is that you don’t need any special software. The browser and connection you are using right now should be all you need. 

Here are two collections of netcams, telerobots, and other Web telepresence devices:

Virtual Web Cams Index is organized by subject and type: weather cams, traffic cams…

WebcamSearch.com is organized geographically as well as by subject. A search engine makes it easier to select from over 11,000 entries. 

Now it’s your turn! Go out there, and tell me what you like and don’t like. If you find a great site that I missed, or if you have any comments at all, send me email.