Surreal image of a 3D future

It was the fag-end of Cebit, and I was trawling round the unpromising back halls, past the banking systems, the change machines, the givers and takers of notes, and through to the infrastructure providers, when I found myself being beckoned by a man from 250 miles away in Brussels. 'You,' he said. 'Sit down. I want to talk to you.'

He looked like a larger version of that hologram of Princess Leah in Star Wars: obviously 'unreal', but three-dimensional and interacting naturally.

'Notice how we can make eye contact,' said the man, who introduced himself as Luc De Backer. 'See? I can pull back the view so you can see the whole room. If there were others here you could see them in the same way. You could never do this on a normal video-conferencing link.'

He was right. It was the most impressive implementation of a virtual presence that I had seen, as well as being the first 3D application that looked as it could find a mass market. And it was done over a link passing just 384Kbit/sec.

Netherlands developer Teleportel says the system also works over a 512K or 768K internet link; but as it chose to use three dedicated ISDN channels for the demonstration, I suspect you would need one with some guaranteed quality of service.

De Backer was hazy about how the system works, though it appears to involve converting 2D into 3D on the fly with software and then rendering it using twin projectors. Costing between £20,000 and £27,000, the system is clearly targeted at large organisations. But tucked in among the mouth-watering LCD and plasma screens at Cebit (see caption where) were hints of how it could reach commodity prices.

Sanyo and Philips showed prototypes of 3D systems that did not require viewing through special glasses. Both involved placing over a standard LCD screen a grating that directed light from adjacent pixels to different eyes.

They could screen either specially compiled graphics, the output of twin cameras, or 2D video rendered into 3D. Neither system looked especially expensive to make, but Teleportel's concept looked far and away one of the most useful ways they could be used. I had little doubt that I was looking at the future of video-telephony. CA.