Telepresence - History

History

The term telepresence was coined in a 1980 article by Marvin Minsky, who outlined his vision for an adapted version of the older concept of teleoperation that focused on giving the remote participation a feeling of actually being present.

A science fiction entitled Waldo by Robert A. Heinlein proposed a primitive telepresence master-slave manipulator system in 1942. In his pioneering paper, Minsky wrote: "My first vision of a remote-controlled economy came from Robert A. Heinlein's prophetic 1948 novel, Waldo." The year of the publication of Waldo in Minsky's comment in the paper was incorrect.

The Brother Assassin, written by Fred Saberhagen in 1969, introduced the complete concept for a telepresence master-slave humanoid system. In the novel, the concept is described as follows: "And a moment later it seemed to all his senses that he had been transported from the master down into the body of the slave-unit standing beneath it on the floor. As the control of its movements passed over to him, the slave started gradually to lean to one side, and he moved its foot to maintain balance as naturally as he moved his own. Tilting back his head, he could look up through the slave's eyes to see the master-unit, with himself inside, maintaining the same attitude on its complex suspension."

The first commercially successful telepresence company, Teleport (which was later renamed TeleSuite), was founded in 1993 by David Allen and Harold Williams. Before TeleSuite, they ran a resort business from which the original concept emerged, because they often found businesspeople would have to cut their stays short to participate in important meetings. Their idea was to develop a technology that would allow businesspeople to attend their meetings without leaving the resorts so that they could lengthen their hotel stays.

Hilton Hotels had originally licensed to install them in their hotels throughout the United States and other countries, but use was low. The idea lost momentum, with Hilton eventually backing out. TeleSuite later began to focus less on the hospitality industry and more on business-oriented telepresence systems. Shareholders eventually held enough stock to replace the company's original leadership, which ultimately led to its collapse. David Allen purchased all of the assets of TeleSuite and appointed Scott Allen as president of the new company called Destiny Conferencing.

Destiny Conferencing licensed its patent portfolio to HP which became the first large company to join the telepresence industry, soon followed by others such as Cisco and Polycom. After forming a distribution agreement with Pleasanton-based Polycom, Destiny Conferencing sold on January 5, 2007 to Polycom for $60 million.

An important research project in telepresence began in 1990. Headquartered at the University of Toronto, the Ontario Telepresence Project "was a three year, $4.8 million pre-competitive research project whose mandate was to design and field trial advanced media space systems in a variety of workplaces in order to gain insights into key sociological and engineering issues. The OTP, which ended December, 1994, was part of the International Telepresence Project which linked Ontario researchers to counterparts in four European nations. The Project’s major sponsor was the Province of Ontario through two of its Centres of Excellence—the Information Technology Research Centre (ITRC) and the Telecommunications Research Institute of Ontario (TRIO)." (quoting from the project's final report) The Project was an interdisciplinary effort involving social sciences and engineering.