Teleportation Through Communications

Notes

IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Correspondence section, November issue; running heads read "IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS, NOVEMBER" with page numbers 754, 755 and 756 (the opening page, 753, carries no footer in the scan). Manuscript received January 22, 1976; revised June 1, 1976. Copyright © 1976 by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.; Annals No. 611SM006. The author is given as with Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ.. Self-archived by the author at http://noll.uscannenberg.org/PDFpapers/Teleportation.pdf — Noll posts his own papers on his site at noll.uscannenberg.org, which is where this copy comes from. Hosting here is with his agreement, given to Bre Pettis directly on 6 October 2026. Noll proposes a communications system intended to give its user the sensation of being physically present somewhere else, and calls it teleportation through communications. The motivation is substitution for travel: he frames the physical transport of people as a contributor to the energy and urban congestion crises, surveys the video teleconferencing then running — Confravision, a Bell Labs link between Murray Hill and Holmdel, and AT&T's intercity Picturephone Meeting Service — and argues their uptake may hinge on the failure to convey physical presence. The design has two halves. The user wears a stereophonic headset with a boom microphone and a spectacle-like optic presenting a separate image to each eye, the optics placing them about six metres away; the pictures come from two small cathode ray tubes at the sides of the headset, or are relayed by fibre optics. The headband is attached to a gimbal sensing head movement. At the far end, two small television cameras sit about six centimetres apart, flanked by two microphones spaced like human ears and a loudspeaker, all on a platform that servo motors tilt and turn to follow the user's head. Because the two camera images are nearly identical, differential coding of one against the other should cut bandwidth, and tracking the user's eyes would let resolution outside the small high-acuity field be degraded unnoticed. The platform becomes a surrogate: turn your head toward a voice and it turns, so people in the room see who you are looking at. Noll concedes the hardware is elaborate and bandwidth-hungry and not a near-term product, cites the Bell Helicopter head-mounted stereoscopic display for pilots, later adapted for graphics research at Utah, as evidence it is feasible, and positions the system as a research tool for studying what physical presence requires. Points of record: Proposes stereophonic audio, stereoscopic video and user control of the remote viewpoint as the three essential ingredients for a feeling of physical presence; The user wears a headset with boom microphone and a spectacle optic fed by two small CRTs; a gimbal on the headband senses head movement; The remote station is a tilt-and-turn platform carrying two TV cameras about 6 cm apart, two microphones spaced like human ears, and a loudspeaker; Bandwidth reductions proposed: differential coding of one eye's image against the other, and eye-tracked reduction of resolution outside the fovea; Cites the Bell Helicopter head-mounted stereoscopic display for pilots, later adapted for computer graphics research at the University of Utah, as proof of feasibility; Concedes the system is not a marketable product and positions it as a research tool for studying physical presence in interpersonal communication. Illustrated: Fig. 1: pictorial depiction of the teleportation-through-communications system, showing the head-piece worn by the user and the equipment at the remote location; Fig. 2: signal-path diagram — headphone, zoom control knob, tilt-and-turn control signals, fibre-optics bundles, right and left video and audio, servo signal generators, remote cameras, zoom lenses, microphones and loudspeaker; Fig. 3: photograph of the Bell Helicopter stereoscopic head-mounted display used by helicopter pilots, with miniature CRTs on the helmet sides, a spherical-mirror reflector and a pellicle beam-splitter. People named: A. Michael Noll (author, Member IEEE, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill), H. W. Upton (Bell Helicopter Company; cited for head-mounted displays in helicopter operations and credited with the Fig. 3 photograph), D. D. Strother (cited with Upton on head-mounted display control systems in V/STOL operations), R. L. Wallace, Jr. (Bell Labs; private communication, the externalised stereophonic headset), T. N. Cornsweet and H. D. Crane (cited; two-dimensional eye tracker), C. H. Séquin and M. F. Tompsett (cited; charge transfer devices), I. E. Sutherland (cited; head-mounted three-dimensional display), R. W. Hough (cited; teleconferencing systems survey, Stanford Research Institute), D. Mitchell, C. A. Bentz, J. J. Horzepa and C. D. Stubbs (cited on Bell System video conferencing). Noted: The printed title is "Teleportation Through Communications" (plural); the supplied citation gives "Teleportation Through Communication". The volume and issue (SMC-6, No. 11) are not legible in the scanned running heads, which give only the journal name and the month. The author's address is printed as "Murray Hill, NJ 70974", an evident transposition of the 07974 ZIP code.