Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University believe that in a few decades, three-dimensional physical avatars of ourselves could be created for teleconferencing. A motion capture system on one end would control a nanotech-enabled telerobot on the other end. According to professors Todd Mowry and Seth Goldstein, the idea was inspired by claymation. From the BBC News (photo with article is incorrectly captioned as Mowry but is actually Goldstein):
"When you watch something created by claymation, it is a real object and it looks like its moving itself. That's something like the idea we're doing… in our case, the idea is that you have computation in the 'clay', as though the clay can move itself.
"So if it was a dog, and you want the dog to move, it will actually move itself. But it is a physical object in front of you – it's not just a picture or hologram or something like that…"
Professor Goldstein has envisioned that, eventually, the objects will be built with "nano-dust" – tiny objects that can be programmed to bind to each other and move – but currently they are trying to build at a much larger scale, working with objects the size of table-tennis balls.
