Gee Rittenhouse sees a future in which an executive running late for a meeting pulls his car to the side of the road and calls into a videoconference. He sets his phone on the dash and adjusts the settings so his image appears to the others as if he were in the same boardroom with everyone else. He chats with the people onscreen and pulls up a virtual PowerPoint, flipping through slides with a gestural swipe through the air. When it’s over, these people separated by thousands of miles go back to their physical surroundings having spent the last half hour feeling like they were a few feet apart in a conference room.
This vision is becoming reality at Bell Labs, where Rittenhouse is research chief. Alcatel-Lucent’s innovation shop, the same one that brought you the Picturephone in the 1960s under AT&T, recently unveiled its great-grandchild, an application called immersive communications. It combines all the “realities” into one: physical, virtual and augmented (reality superimposed with sound or graphics).