In 1994, Jeff Schwartz and Dan Wong fired up the San Francisco FogCam. For 25 years, it kept a constant vigil on the San Francisco State University campus, making the FogCam the longest operating webcam in history. (The first webcam, the Trojan Room coffee pot cam, went online in 1991 and shut down in 2001.) At the end of the month, Schwartz and Wong will turn off the FogCam. From SF Gate:
"Our webcam is a throwback to the early days of the Internet when anyone could do anything," Schwartz said.
The webcam will be switched off on August 30, but Schwartz says the website itself will be kept up "for sake of posterity."
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The Snowbot -- a $14,000 Beampro telepresence robot that Edward Snowden pilots from Moscow -- is becoming a fixture at conferences, meetings, and in the halls of power in the USA, where Snowden is a frequent invited guest. Read the rest
Artists and journalists will use virtual reality to transform perception—and virtual reality will transform everything. Jason Louv stares into the Rift between promise and product.
Korea's Hanwha Eagles baseball team have installed rows of telerobot "fans" in the stadium that are controlled by remote spectators. (Thanks, Chris Arkenberg!)
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Edward Snowden routinely hangs around at the New York ACLU offices by means of a BEAM telepresence robot, through which he can meet with journalists for "face-to-face" interviews. During a recent interview with Julia Prosinger from Der Tagesspeiggel, Prosinger had her first-ever epileptic seizure, brought on by the flickering screen where he appeared. Read the rest
This is Toyota's new arm-wresting robot. Apparently, its other application is for "human support" such as assisting disabled people and caring for the elderly in their homes. The robot's body can raise up and down and its tablet head is well-suited for telepresence. Toyota's Human Support Robot (via IEEE Spectrum) Read the rest
