Telepresence & Avatars: Connecting Humanity Beyond the Barriers of Time, Distance and Culture

 

Transforming Connections Through Machines

What if you could feel the comforting embrace of a family member who lives across the globe?

What if hospitalised children could continue to attend school, see their family and friends, and communicate with the outside world?

What if you could make it easier for elderly parents and people living with disabilities to enjoy outdoor activities and experience local attractions without the travel?

We’re working with All Nippon Airways (ANA) as part of their Beyond ALL vision and the XPRIZE competition to connect people limitlessly for a better world via telepresence and teleoperation. By integrating multiple exponential technologies ranging from robotics to haptics, real-world avatars will allow anyone to teleport their presence, consciousness, knowledge, and skills to a remote location.

With ANA funding and facilitating Shadow’s work with other leading organisations (known as Converge Robotics consisting of Shadow, HaptX and Tangible Research) we designed, developed and created the world’s first haptic telerobot known as the Tactile Telerobot. It consists of Shadow’s Dexterous Hand, haptic gloves from HaptX, biomimetic sensors from SynTouch, UR arm and a VIVE tracker. The Tactile Telerobot can fit across a range of sectors such as Nuclear, Pharma and Space. Avatars are a daring and new area for us that we’d like to explore.

Contact us for remote teleoperation and telepresence demos, enquiries or to purchase our Tactile Telerobot.

Case Studies:

Beyond All

ANA has already started to pioneer real-world applications of this technology and will continue to accelerate and expand the scope of this initiative to physically connect the entire world. The ANA avatar will allow humanity to go beyond all limitations and finally break through the remaining barriers of distance, time, and culture that exist in our world.

With an avatar test field to be in the southern Japanese prefecture of Oita, ANA is revolutionising avatar technology within a broad range of sectors spanning from agriculture to remote fishing to travelling via real-world remote exploration. It’s under this collaboration that Shadow, Tangible and HaptX joined forces to create our remarkable Tactile Telerobot.

 

Avatar XPRIZE

The ANA Avatar XPRIZE is a four-year global competition focused on the development of an avatar system that echoes the vision of Beyond All. Participants will need to create a system that can transport a human’s sense, actions, and presence to a remote location in real-time, leading to a more connected world for the prize money of $10 million! Shadow Robot is a Technical Advisor to the competition. Components or the whole Tactile Telerobot system can be bought by participants to help with their entry.

 

We welcome a chat with researchers, competition entrants and companies interested in the areas of instantaneous transportation, telepresence, teleoperation, avatars, and/or virtual reality. Live demos can be requested so that you can see the tech in action.

Put me in touch