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If you think your work-at-home gig provides a safe harbor from the constant hovering of your overbearing boss, your tranquility may soon be shattered thanks to the development of a telepresence blimp designed for interaction with remote workers and others who need a real-time presence while situated in a remote location.

According to the publication New Scientist, yesterday Tobita Hiroaki and colleagues at Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Tokyo have built a blimp (currently unnamed) that can be operated remotely to project a video representation of people into a room at another remote location.

According to Dan Nosowitz writing for Popsci (Popular Science), the blimp “shows a projection of the telepresence-r's face on a meter-wide balloon.” He said it works “generally like all blimps do, powered by a few small propellers located underneath the balloon. It's controlled remotely, with a webcam on the user's face updating live, and broadcasts audio through a built-in speaker.”

In a scenario where the telepresence blimp is used to connect with you while you are working at home, Jim Giles writing for New Scientist describes the experience as, “Suddenly, a super-sized video feed of your boss, projected onto to the front of a helium-filled balloon equipped with a loudspeaker, floats silently into the room and starts issuing orders from above your head.” Well, so much for being a lonely home-based worker. Even the developer, Hiroaki, says “it’s very strange.”

Nevertheless, since the telepresence blimp allows people to virtually be in two places at one time, it lends itself to a variety of other worthwhile, “non-freaky” applications, for example, a medical specialist who can't make it to a hospital, but needs to consult a patient there or an academic expert who wants to deliver a lecture remotely, suggests Daily India.

The blimp developed by Hiroaki is reportedly part of a larger movement that is aimed at making telepresence possible. For example, Anybots (News - Alert), a company based in California, is marketing a robot that can be operated over the Internet that displays a video of the person controlling the device, but it has wheels, which prevents it from climbing stairs. Hiroaki’s blimp, on the other hand, can float up stairs and hover around rooms.

When he discussed the project on Wednesday at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Hiroaki said the telepresence blimp is still in the early development stage and along with his colleagues will do user studies to learn what it's like to interact with the device. Hi thinking is that the user experience might be more pleasurable if the blimp uses a projection the size of a normal head. In any event, Hiroaki says, "There's huge potential here." 

 In other news, TMCnet reported that telepresence specialist Polycom (News - Alert) is looking to make video conferencing a bit more personal and intimate with the EagleEye Director, the company's new room tracking system.

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