Nerd tip 1 - Put your video conference window by the camera!

Many of you have probably tried for example Skype video conferencing only to be frustrated by that it doesn't feel like very natural or good communication. I discovered a very simple and possibly obvious remedy to improve the situation - put your video window close to the camera!


Of course you need to look into the camera in order not to feel absent, but I hadn't thought of that where you position the video window matters to connect when you pay attention and look at the window with when you look into the camera. In all of the three windows above I am looking at the video window, but only in the middle one would it seem like I'm paying attention to the person I'm talking to.

Of course this works also when you want to record something on camera like I did above. Please excuse that I'm otherwise so inexperienced in front of the camera and speaking according to a script :-) .

Amazing inventions of art - the Telectroscope tunnel between New York and London

As I read recently in Framtidsbloggen (in Swedish), someone has dug a tunnel between New York and London! Or well, that's only how it seems - someone had the idea of the Telectroscope:


Very simple - the tunnel is of course too long to walk through, but it should be possible to point telescopes towards each other in the US and England, and have people see each other, right?

Well, through the wonders of telepresence and Internet, it's been made possible in a real-life installation! Go to London (well, that's far enough for me, but that's beside the point...) and wave to your family in New York! Or maybe we'll see meeting places which exist in several places, connected with telepresence walls? Fiction so far, but telepresence is still my hobbyhorse...

(Update: Even before I published this piece, Sven Paulus managed to send me this touching piece about telepresence between Israel and Palestine... cool!

Also, an acquaintance of mine has visited the Telectroscope in London, and says the simple things were fascinating, like that it was day in New York... and that the news telling of the scope didn't mention it as fake or a piece of art, just that it was a relative of the creator who came up with the idea for the secret optics to accomplish the thing)

(Update 2: Erik Starck sent me the strange Greyworld World Bench which enables school kids in different parts of the world to share a park bench and a chat with each other. Without 3d-screen though, this doesn't become as charmingly accurate as the Telectroscope)

(Update 3: There would be no island in the middle, as the sketches claim :-)


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