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That's me in the middle !
Our Tokyo Bureau
31 DEC
AS ROBOTS go, this one doesn't look like much. It rolls on a small four-wheeled base, and its instruments--a video camera, a hand-sized screen and a microphone--perch atop a thin pole. You might be tempted to hang your coat on it, but don't be misled. This is no ordinary robot. With a PC and a connection to the Internet, almost anybody could "become" this robot for a time and explore laboratories, attend lectures or even just hang out with friends.
A PRoP operates via a wireless radio link to the World Wide Web. An Internet user logs on to the device and achieves what Canny and Paulos have dubbed "tele-embodiment", seeing what the PRoP sees, listening to what it hears and talking to the people the ProP meets. In theory, any company employee could visit an overseas office using just one PRoP. With a simple program on a PC, the user can control the movement of the robot and look around using its colour video camera. He or she talks through its speaker, listens with its microphone and gestures with the PRoP's small arm. The robot also features a live video image of the user's face on a liquid-crystal display.
With a PRoP you can stroll through a building in some distant location, attend meetings, or pop into offices. The researchers find that one of the most intriguing and useful things a PRoP can do is just "hang out". Since the PRoP in principle can go anywhere, any time, it can be spontaneous in a way that existing teleconferencing techniques certainly can't. A PRoP could let someone in New York spend an hour in a London office, where they might bump into a colleague at the coffee machine and swap a few ideas
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