Quick Dips

Extending Electronic Eyes

Every few seconds images taken by a video camera high on top of Auckland University are fed into the university's Hyper-G networked multimedia system, giving people around the world an eye on the City of Sails.

Hyper-G can be accessed via Internet, a global network with an estimated 10 to 100 million users.

"Someone with a computer in, for example, the US can reserve part of the computer screen to display the current picture from Auckland while continuing with other work," says Professor Hermann Maurer of the university's Hypermedia Unit.

Using video cameras to monitor processes, shops or public places has been around a long time, often for surveillance or security reasons. The experiment at Auckland has two novel elements that may be quite revolutionary, according to Maurer.

First, feeding pictures from video cameras into digital networks can be done from an arbitrary number of cameras, potentially hundreds, thousands, and eventually tens of thousands of cameras.

Users of international networks will be able to tap into a whole host of images -- skiing activities near Queenstown, a satellite view of Africa, the Bay of Islands from a cruise boat, Hawaiian surfing beaches, Antarctica's Mt Erebus, a Fijian hotel, the cafeteria's coffee pot (is it a fresh brew?)...

"Thus, our eyesight is extended beyond our office walls or windows to thousands of interesting places all over the world, including the microscopically small and the very far away (such as observing the moon through a high-powered telescope)," says Maurer. He sees the day when most major sports stadiums and the like will be eventually "on the net", enabling paying viewers to "see" any sports event, festival, or arts performance.

Users would also be able to operate the cameras in such a set-up, giving commands for turning the camera, or zooming in and out as desired. This is not the stuff of science fiction, but is currently being implemented by Achim Schneider and Paul Qualtrough at the HyperMedia Unit.

"Once more, a leading-edge experiment is carried out in New Zealand, opening new vistas in a very literal sense, showing for the first time that the passive viewing of one of the many TV channels or other new "infotainment" options will soon be enriched by one more alternative -- televiewing to wherever you want, extending the scope of your eyes for information, entertainment, pleasure or work in a way no one dreamt of even a few years ago," Maurer says.