IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

its.’’ In Doors of Perception conferences during these years, when our conference
themes were words like ‘‘speed,’’ ‘‘lightness,’’ and ‘‘flow,’’ we too
promoted the idea that a combination of fast information and slow matter
could provide a way out of the mobility dilemma.
But dematerialization didn’t happen. On the contrary, as we have seen,
the Internet hugely accelerated the physical movement of people and stuff.
It became possible to do things outside the company that were once done
inside—and so we did. The Internet has done more to increase road traffic,
particularly of goods, than all the truck manufacturers put together. The
same goes for people. The Internet did not replace business and recreational
travel, it stimulated us to travel more. New business models accelerated
the process. Value webs, in which networks of suppliers work together
within a single process, entail a lot more movement of stuff.
Being There
Mobility 61
If the aim of travel were simply to exchange information, then we wouldn’t
bother doing it. The trouble is—to state the obvious—that’s not why we do
it. It’s that mind-body business: Experientially, there never will be a simulated
alternative to actually ‘‘being there.’’ The world’s telecommunications
companies (telcos) have still not absorbed this fact. On the contrary, they
continue to spend vast amounts of money and bandwidth in the expectation
that demand will explode for systems that reproduce as closely as
possible the sensation of ‘‘being there.’’ At one of Germany’s huge national
computer laboratories (now known as the Frauenhofer-Gesellschaft), one
research team harnessed together a whole row of superfast Thinking
Machine computers in order to increase the perceptual depth of its virtual
conference room. The engineers’ idea was to re-create as closely as possible
the experience of sitting around a conference table—only with the people
opposite you being located in different parts of the world. I remember the
director of the institute at the time (this was 1994) proudly showing me a
huge radio dish on the back of a truck that was parked outside his office. He
told me he had his own dedicated satellite channel ready and waiting for
the teleconferencing system to be deployed.
Other presence researchers have built face-to-face teleportals that involve
wearing a headset that incorporates a projective display and stereo video
cameras. Such systems allow participants to view 3-D, stereoscopic, videobased
images of the faces of remote participants, local participants, and a