CVPR Daily - Wednesday

out how to do these conferences without everybody travelling to the same place. Do you mean that human science will break time and space? Well, the question is whether we can live in a VR world or augmented-reality world, where the experience of travelling there is as good as the experience of encountering it at home. Here’s my vision for how it works with the time zones because we’re not going to change the time zones. The idea is we might run local models of the conference. Maybe in England we would have a hotel somewhere and 200 people would go to that place. Then they would all switch to California time. Breakfast would be served at 5pm. People would attend talks until midnight. Let’s see it from another point of view: a significant share of the people that I love the most in this world are here at this conference and I meet them once a year. Now you are telling me, as an engineer, you would like to find a solution so that I will never meet them again! What do you think I will tell about it? I tell you this, nothing is stopping you meeting them. You should meet them more! You can’t shake their hand. We don’t have a good solution for that. I definitely want to be able to sit here with a glass of beer and you sit there with a glass of beer, but you’re 2,000 miles away. I was at a workshop yesterday, Computer Vision for VR and AR, and a few people – Facebook, Christian Theobalt, Yaser Sheikh – were showing us a vision of the future where the process of me talking to you will visually be exactly the same as being together. I’ll have a full 3D view. Perfect lighting. I think that is a boundary. I don’t know where the good enough boundary is, but once we go over it and once it’s good enough, I think it will be amazing. We will spend more time together because it will be fun to phone you up and spend an hour with you some evening. Okay, and you think that with this solution you will be able to convince me? I don’t know what we’re going to do about the shaking hands. I wonder if we will generate some alternative. One of the things that I was surprised by in the HoloLens was when we put hand tracking in the device, I thought it would be really important to have haptic feedback when you touch things, but it turns out that just watching the virtual finger touch the virtual blob, and the virtual slider move left and right, maybe with a little bit of audio, suddenly feels like haptic. It feels like I’m touching it. It’s almost the real thing. It’s almost the real thing. Clearly shaking hands, we’re not going to get to the real thing. But we’ll get to a proxy which is almost as good as it. We might invent a proxy which is we put our hands in the virtual air and we kind of like ding them, and if they make a little noise when the fingers touch, then maybe that’ll feel fine. I don’t know. We’d have to try it. I would not rule it out immediately. I would say that might feel cool. Ding! 13 DAILY CVPR Wednesday Andrew Fitzgibbon