Running study

Project information

Project results

Project management (password-protected page)

For further information please contact:

Anastasius Gavras
Programme Manager
Eurescom
Wieblinger Weg 19/4
69123 Heidelberg, Germany

What is this study about?

The background of the study is advances at the borderline of ICT to other science disciplines. In particular neuroscience and medicine make service scenarios possible that range from augment reality over to perceived time travel or teleportation up to augmented cognition.

Real travel will become increasingly expensive and in future the necessary energy for long-distance travel might just not be affordable any more. May the reason for travelling be business meetings, private holidays, or just meeting friends we should start looking for alternatives to physical travel. Audio/video-conferencing and telepresence systems are available solutions, but are often expensive, complicated to use, of limited quality, and do not give any real feeling of being at the other location.

What about teleporting oneself to the other location? Or use virtual technologies in a way that it feels like really being there? The advances in real 3D, smell, taste, haptics and similar technologies will improve the reality feeling. Eventually the virtual environment might not be distinguishable any more from the real environment.

Neuroscience begins to understand the human brain, cognition and human behavior in complex dynamic environments. Technology and engineering have started to develop and implement the concept of a brain-computer interface, and starts to deliver wireless and weareable interfaces. Although all applications are still in the experimental phase, the area has made significant leaps forward. In particular progress in made in both directions namely (i) control or communicate with a machine via brain commands, and (ii) augment the brain’s cognition with information from outside.

Long term visions

• Using modern and future ICT for creating a perfect virtual environment which feels like a real environment, and hence replaces the requirement for travelling physically to another place. This could be used for travelling in space or for travelling in time.
• Deliver technology that allows humans to operate complex machines and in complex environments and reduce or eliminate the probability of human errors in safety critical environments, e.g. aircraft operations, power plants, etc. Furthermore provide the means to teach humans complex facts in a short time and aid the rehabilitation of damaged human brains.

When these long term visions become closer to reality the network and service infrastructure must be there to support the visions.

Objectives

Current technology is not sufficient for providing a virtual environment which cannot be distinguished from a real environment any more. Particularly the look and feel of the virtual environment must be much more realistic. There are two crucial technological requirements:

• 3D display technologies are giving a fully realistic impression of the environment and the people in this environment. For example in a virtual meeting all people sitting at a meeting table must look completely real, i.e. the virtual ones must be full 3D colour representations. It is a long way to go for 3D display technologies, but it does not seem impossible.
• It must be possible to touch, feel and smell the virtual environment. This requires advances in haptical interfaces and smell displays.

Once those realistic 3D and haptical interfaces are available, people who want to meet other people "go into the virtual environment" (as today they "go into the Internet"). This could be a separate room in a future home where all the required equipment and all the necessary bandwidth are available. This virtual environment can also be used to explore other countries on a "virtual holiday trip" or explore other times on a "virtual historic trip". Eventually the user should not be able to distinguish between a real and virtual meeting or trip.

Related work called Virtual out-of-body experience was recently presented by the EPFL Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience [1]

Augment cognition is a research field that among others aims at providing disruptive human-computer interaction capabilities. Applications areas are personal assistance to enhance human performance, adaptive interfaces helping humas to operate complex machines, decision aid and many more. DARPA had worked during the accelerated training programme to identify the neural basis of expert performance by integration of behavioral data with neurophysiological measures to track the progression of novices on the training path to expertise. Ultimately, this research was aiming to provide the necessary foundation for how to optimize task qualities and learning environments and to accelerate the novice-to-expert progression[2][3].

Certainly the starting point is the progress made in neurosciences as well as the first technology that is available to interface with the human brain. From a distance it seems like the barriers are more in the neurosciences and the understanding of how the human brain works and less the technology and engineering needed to support the implementation of augmented cognition.

The underlying assumption of the study proposal is that the above described advances will mature in the not so distant future and some services and applications may become commodity. The requirements on the network and enabling service infrastructure must be understood and rolled out in time, in order to take advantage of the potential large new service and application market.

The objectives of this study are:

• Describe three scenarios of possible future applications the support human cognition
• Short term scenario could be related to mass market introduction of augmented reality technologies
• Mid term scenario could be related to “real virtuality” – an undistinguishable virtual reality
• Long term scenario could be related to augmented cognition, e.g. accelerated training
• Develop mid- to long-term networking requirements for the above scenarios
• Estimate the potential need for upgrading the network and service infrastructure
• Estimate a possible timeline of potential deployment

D1 - Scenarios driving network evolution, planned issue date October 2011, Eurescom Study Programme confidential

D2 -Requirements for network evolution, planned issue date January 2012, Eurescom Study Programme confidential

D3 - Support of human cognition (Presentation), planned issue date January 2012, Eurescom Study Programme confidential