3D points clouds for immersive real estate and telepresence experiences

Speaking of point clouds, immersive and augmented telepresence, my “robot friends” turned me on to something very cool this morning, a company called Matterport. It uses a stationary rotating camera to create a point cloud of a real estate property interior that can then be visited virtually. Their videos look great:

In my mind, this kind of thing opens up some interesting possibilities in the field of telepresence. That is, you could scan a workspace — your office or whatever — and from this compile a 3D model/map that your telepresence robot could use for more autonomous navigation of obstacles.

But, even more than that, you could develop hybrid presence options. That is, maybe in addition to having the option to navigate a remote space via a robot, you would also be able to navigate it virtually as an avatar/ghost. You wouldn’t necessarily be able to see/hear directly while you float, but perhaps you could access ambient camera/audio information for a space, and if you wanted to, you could conceivably jump into and out of a telepresence-enabled display screen, or a variety of robots/devices scattered throughout an environment, as in this picture from the poorly-named OpenQwaq:

Aside: love this line…

Openqwaq is developed on Squeak that uses Croquet sharing training model

Gosh, jargon much?