Robotic Nation Evidence

Robots taking your place

From the article:

Bought the tickets and don’t feel much like going? NTT Communication Science Laboratories have developed a robot with a head modeled on the shape of your own, including microphones just where your ears would be, that will sit in your seat and send an audio picture of a concert back to your headphones. A sensor in your headset measures the tilt of your head and has the robot follow suit. There are plans to develop a version with cameras, too.

This would seem like a logical extension to television. You get a feed that provides binocular hearing and binocular vision from the concert hall, sporting event, etc. You could get the "standard feed", or a personal feed where you control the head yourself.

The other way to do this is to reconstruct virtual images of the sporting event from any angle in real time. It is made possible by using dozens of cameras, processing all of the images and figuring out where everything is so that any viewpoint can be created computationally. This article and this one describe the process in some detail. Instead of a robot sitting in a specific (not necessarily good) seat and providing you with a view from there, you can choose any viewpoint (including on the field, in the huddle, etc.) at any time.