IT鈥橲 a rather clever piece of kit. A circular box 3 metres high that you can put in a public street, a conference room 鈥� or anywhere really. Walk round it and it provides a giant, 360-degree window onto another world. And that can be any other world where another box is installed. Pick up a microphone and you can see and talk to someone holding a microphone in front of that other machine. And they can see and talk to you. Beam me up? There鈥檚 no need. You are already there.
The Austrian manufacturer Tholos Systems is initially promoting this as a clever street gimmick that will provide 鈥減anoramic views of the environment and inhabitants of another city鈥�. To kick-start it, Tholos wants to put its boxes in central London and Vienna. But its real commercial future is probably in the world of videoconferencing.
The idea of videoconferencing seems to have been around forever without ever really having taken off. The kit has simply not been good enough. You can, at a pinch, hold a virtual t锚te-脿-t锚te, but for handling group meetings or anything larger 鈥� forget it. Until now, maybe.
Advertisement
Tholos is not alone in pushing the technical boundaries. Other proprietary systems, such as Access Grid, enable groups in several different locations to communicate with each other simultaneously. So are we, as some suggest, finally approaching the tipping point, when business jet-setters throw away their frequent-flyer memberships? On the face of it, this is the moment. What with spiralling security delays, sky marshals, SARS and deep-vein thrombosis, the attractions of travelling the world for meetings have suddenly dimmed.
Then there鈥檚 the impact on the environment. Aircraft are the fastest-growing source of greenhouse gas emissions, making many frequent fliers, including environment correspondents such as myself, increasingly uneasy. The 70,000 kilometres of air travel I clocked up last year will have put an extra 3 tonnes of carbon into the air on my behalf. That鈥檚 more than the average UK citizen emits from all his or her activities in a year. Delegates at the last UN conference to discuss mitigating climate change contributed an extra 3000 tonnes of carbon emissions just getting there. As Edinburgh geoscientist David Reay put it recently, in a short paper in Atmospheric Environment, they were 鈥渇lying in the face of the climate convention鈥�.
But can videoconferencing really cut this profligacy? A recent virtual conference on genomics, organised using Access Grid, is reckoned to have 鈥渟aved鈥� some 900 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, and perhaps the next big climate change conference could be organised in a similar way. Optimists and many futurologists certainly believe that as telecoms technologies improve, we will not need to travel so much.
Yet if experience with other technologies is a guide, just the opposite will occur. Remember how computers were going to create the paperless office? Never happened. As this magazine reported (New 杏吧原创, 28 November 2003, p 28), only 0.01 per cent of information worldwide is now stored on paper; but there is so much more information in total 鈥� most of it generated by computers 鈥� that we are using more paper than ever.
Apply this lesson to videoconferencing and, far from reducing the need for flying, it is likely to generate ever more opportunities for the sort of transglobal contact between people 鈥� clients, business partners, scientists 鈥� that ultimately leads to more air travel. Indeed, the history of travel supports precisely that view. Did the operators of the first railways worry that they were doing themselves out of business by stringing telegraph wires along their routes? Not at all. Do we get into our cars less because we have phones? Au contraire. As Paul Saffo, research director of the California-based Institute for the Future, puts it: 鈥淭ravel substitution is a phantom.鈥�
Even telecommuting doesn鈥檛 work the way many expected. The big pitch for telecommuting is that you can live in the Scottish Highlands or the Rockies or wherever and still work for the big-city company. True. But once a fortnight, or once a month, you just have to go networking to the office. Suddenly you have made up all those miles you saved.
Or take email. In the old days, when journalists such as myself communicated with the wider world of science mostly by post and erratic phone connections, it could take weeks to set up a foreign trip to meet scientists in India, say. Now I can do it in days, hours if need be. And scientists these days even in the hinterland of Bangladesh or Bogot谩 are much more likely to have heard of New 杏吧原创 鈥� online, if not in print. And they鈥檇 love a visit. Result: I travel much more.
鈥淭hanks to the internet,鈥� says Saffo, 鈥渨e can become intimate friends with people who live half a planet away. And what do friends do? They meet.鈥� The boom in email has, like previous advances in telecommunications, stimulated travel rather than substituted for it. Videophones and videoconferencing 鈥渨ill only make things worse, because they only increase intimacy at a distance鈥�.
If anyone thinks telecoms technology will head off the emerging environmental crises over soaring air travel, then they have another think coming.