I doubt this sort of thing will become the preferred way to attend a wedding any time soon, but until recently it wouldn’t have been possible for the home-bound bridesmaid to attend at all.
Telepresence will only get better — easier to use, more reliable, with more control for the remote user — over time. It wouldn’t surprise me to see, in ten or fifteen years, car-rental companies keeping a few specialized vehicles on hand for this sort of thing: a self-driving rental car that would act as a base station, with a telepresence robot (essentially an iPad-like screen and camera on a mobile body controlled by the remote user) that detaches itself on command to wander among other, mostly flesh-and-blood guests. It might become a viable alternative to air travel, as the TSA makes it ever-less convenient and less pleasant to take a plane.
(I recall seeing things similar to the basic idea of telepresence in science fiction, but only rarely, and I don’t recall exactly where. The storyline generally requires that a human body be present — to be at risk for the heroes, and to be capturable for the villains.)
The future that humanity envisioned in the fifties isn’t here yet, but it’s shuffling closer at an ever-increasing rate. 🙂
hmph facetime, I can do Skype on this, which means they can use PCs. 😉 (and touchpads). Well, except touchpads are kind of dead. 😉
Yeah, I think the iPad is about the only currently-available device that fits the bill. 🙂
Hopefully HP will wake up and the Touchpad, or some other WebOS tablet from them or someone who purchases the IP, will be currently available again, it really is a nice device, even though the app ecosystem is kind of minimal. (The same is true, however, of Android tablets – it actually has more tablet apps than Honeycomb, or at least at-release it did, and stands because of the now-large userbase to pick up a few more. 🙂 Also, they’ve got Cyanogenmod 7 running on it in alpha, I expect it’ll become a very nice Android tablet soon enough as well.)
The Touchpad is obviously a desirable device, but only at a much lower price-point than HP demanded for it. Almost the whole reason that the iPad is so popular (as far as I can tell, living with an iPad-owner) is that it’s compatible with iPhone software but has a larger screen. That and Apple’s coolness factor.
I agree, some Android tablets even were priced higher than the iPad at launch. What were they thinking?!
They were thinking that if the iPad could command that much, they could get even more with a non-Apple product. In other words, they were insane. 😉
It goes to show that if you put the bean counters in charge, profits don’t automatically improve. 😉
On the contrary, beancounters do improve profits. That’s what they do best. Of course, they do it by short-term thinking and sacrificing the company’s future prospects for a little extra cash today.
There’s a place in companies for beancounters — but that place is not at the top. You need a visionary there. And the beancounters have to be balanced with a few creative and technical teams who are not subject to the iron fist of the beancounters.
Considering that tablets costing more than or the same as the iPad are selling about 10-15% of inventory, perhaps an exception exists. 😉