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Beam Yourself To Distant Places

The cleverly-named Beam Remote Telepresence System robot lets you move between distant locations faster than if you had teleportation stepping discs.


(Beam Remote Telepresence System video)

[T]he bot is roughly 5 feet tall, weighs 95 pounds, can roll along at walking speed (about 5 feet per second), and has a 17-inch screen. It's got two HD cameras, six microphones, speakers, Wi-Fi, and LED lamps.

Fully charged, the battery can power Beam for eight hours of active use. Users pilot the device with Windows or Mac OS X client software and their mouse or keyboard. When done, they'll steer the device into a recharging dock.

I read about this very idea idea thirty years ago in Niven and Pournelle's 1981 novel Oath of Fealty. In the novel, little remote-operated robots (with a screen showing the user's face) called "Arr-Twos" were used to help Chief Engineer Tony Rand see everything at once in an enormous arcology:

Good as the Arr-twos were, with their full two-way communications and their TV screen to show Rand's face, he'd found it necessary to get out and talk to the technicians and carpenters and pipe fitters and maintenance people; talk to them himself, because most construction people didn't like talking to an Arr-two even with Rand's TV image.
(Read more about Niven and Pournelle's robot probes)

Put yourself in distant places with these unusual telepresence robots:

Via CNet.

Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 9/27/2012)

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