Seriously. Usually the only way we can see images of other places is through media, which may be biased. (Even if the stories are true, the stories which are chosen may not be representative.) This is a really cool opportunity to cut through all of that and just show everyday people.
It would also be really cool if there was some kind of live translation that let people talk to each other in their native languages.
Well, I much prefer people mooning each other, or, similarly, the actual happenstance of countries voting for and against each other in the Eurovision Song Contest for reasons other than musical merit, to armed conflict.
You could ask someone in Dublin to pass on a message, walk over to the portal coming from the “other side”, and maybe receive your message back from someone in Japan or something :-)
SecretNYC (and all their secret sub brands, one per major city) always sussed me out a bit. They seem to just be blogs about events, but they also host their own, very templated events, like the Van Gogh immersive exhibits and the Candlelight Concerts (among others). They do this in every city and advertise the fuck out of them, which makes them seem more hollow when you see the scale of their enterprise from a 300ft view...
This is great. We should have many more of these. I am always surprised how different cities in other countries are when you travel there vs. what you see in the media. I really think this can bring people together.
We have one in Lublin, PL for the past several years. I’m not sure if ours will be moved or if they are building a new pair.
There’s no audio. Webcam quality isn’t a pretty bad, maybe 720p with lots of compression artifacts. It’s not a 4k screen, reminds me of digital signage used for highway billboards.
It’s still entertaining but every time I see it I long for 8k and a gigabit uplink.
It’s because the photos are of an existing Portal installation in Lublin, Poland and Vilnius, Lithuania. Lublin is my city and this thing has been running for a few years now. Everyone loves waving at it and seeing if anyone on the other side waves back. It’s quite silly but also rather touching.
Presumably because they are of a previous location of the art’s installation. The article is written in future tense, so it stands to reason that there are no (interesting) pictures of the new installation yet.
Reminds me of the Shared Studios containers, except those have audio [1]. Funnily enough, that also started as a project called Portal (between New York and Tehran) [2].
What we really need is to have people on both sides of the pond dress up as green men from outer space and wave to each other with three webbed digits.
Cool stuff. It's kind of interesting because the time zones are several hours off, so I wonder how well it works at night. From the renders I see the quality doesn't seem that great (for better or worse), still quite fascinating to look through I'm sure.
I wonder what the latency is going to be on this. It needs to be at least 1/30th of a second round trip but I suspect the actual latency is going to be more like 1s+
Wired, using the subsea fiber cables, your still stuck at a 60 ms RTT minimum from NYC to Dublin. Add in video transcoding time and a more realistic estimate of the networks on either side, and you're looking at latency closer to 200-400 ms. WiFi over this distance actually isn't a significant contributor to latency.
Actually transcoding can be done far below that with consumer hardware. I’m doing Quicksync accelerated transcoding right now for Moonlight and encoding/decoding latency is only a few ms. And Wifi is, by far the greatest source of latency. In fact I can get data to a datacenter a few hundred km away over a fiber connection faster than Wifi across the room (<5ms vs 10-20ms)
Latency will be far more than that due to speed of light.
My mpeg vision circuits are about 480ms end to end from Washington/New York to London. The j2k ones are faster but still in the 200ms range. In theory you could get it down to sub 100ms but at that point you are certainly having to engineer your paths correctly and use barely any compression.
Uncompressed 4k is in the 10gbit range. My uhd jxs bitrates are about 1.3gbit but wouldn’t deliver sub 200 across the pond.
OP is correct, 1/30 s is a good ballpark theoretical lower bound.
Assuming travel across the earth surface, light in a vacuum take about 14ms to cross the distances. Times two for round trip that’s about 1/30 s.
Of course we don’t have anywhere near ideal conditions there (at a minimum, light in fiber is already slower, closer to 40ms round trip in that case, and of course network infrastructure adds orders of magnitude), but it’s a good limit.
I was thinking more about the rtt to do something in new york and see the reaction of the person in Dublin, which would probably be the major indicator of latency.
Realtime means different things in different contexts. If I can watch a webcam of freeway traffic, than 5 seconds delay is, for all intents and purposes, realtime.
If we talk about medical equipment, it may be very different based on the equipment.
Real time OSs advertise maximum guaranteed latencies. 0 latency does not exist in the physical world, the speed of light can’t be convinced to hurry up, unfortunately.
As in since the U.K. shot itself in the foot more effort is being spent on an English speaking country in Europe at the expense of an English speaking country in its own.
Ehhh I wouldn’t think it’d make a significant difference on its own. London is what it is (was what it was?) because of centuries of English imperial hegemony, not just because it’s English-speaking. Berliners speak the global lingua franca virtually just as well and - with no slight intended to the Irish - their city is a much more natural fit as the new European cosmopolitan cultural Mecca.
Dublin’s rising global prominence probably has more to do with Ireland’s rather business-friendly taxation policies.
Come on, it does not take long consideration to appreciate how this can be interesting, even if the technical requirements aren’t interesting in themselves.
It would also be really cool if there was some kind of live translation that let people talk to each other in their native languages.
would make for a beautiful realisation
"how petty our differences become, when we realize we all use the same butt"
https://youtu.be/YkcVzNyj5sI?si=XXY3dnm8WPrmmbu0
I wonder what the resolution and frame rate is too?
Article was lacking technical detail.
There’s no audio. Webcam quality isn’t a pretty bad, maybe 720p with lots of compression artifacts. It’s not a 4k screen, reminds me of digital signage used for highway billboards.
It’s still entertaining but every time I see it I long for 8k and a gigabit uplink.
Locations: https://www.portals.org/portals
(I don't know Dublin well enough to tell if any of them are of the Dublin side.)
Seems you might be thinking of a specific building instead
Doesn't look like it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/arts/design/21tele.html
It had a steam punky kind of look.
https://www.artichoke.uk.com/project/the-telectroscope/
[1] https://www.sharedstudios.com/
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portals_(initiative)
In reality it's probably even faster since neither side is dealing with Wi-Fi.
Dublin is about 10-50 times further from NY than you are from that datacenter, and the speed of light is a universal limit.
Latency will be far more than that due to speed of light.
My mpeg vision circuits are about 480ms end to end from Washington/New York to London. The j2k ones are faster but still in the 200ms range. In theory you could get it down to sub 100ms but at that point you are certainly having to engineer your paths correctly and use barely any compression.
Uncompressed 4k is in the 10gbit range. My uhd jxs bitrates are about 1.3gbit but wouldn’t deliver sub 200 across the pond.
Assuming travel across the earth surface, light in a vacuum take about 14ms to cross the distances. Times two for round trip that’s about 1/30 s.
Of course we don’t have anywhere near ideal conditions there (at a minimum, light in fiber is already slower, closer to 40ms round trip in that case, and of course network infrastructure adds orders of magnitude), but it’s a good limit.
1/30th of 1s is almost exactly the round-trip time from NYC to Dublin (Wolfram Alpha says 17ms one-way).
If we talk about medical equipment, it may be very different based on the equipment.
Real time OSs advertise maximum guaranteed latencies. 0 latency does not exist in the physical world, the speed of light can’t be convinced to hurry up, unfortunately.
If so, I don't see how this is any different. If not, that's a pretty narrow definition of realtime given the context.
In the meantime, this seems cool!
Dublin’s rising global prominence probably has more to do with Ireland’s rather business-friendly taxation policies.
Come on, it does not take long consideration to appreciate how this can be interesting, even if the technical requirements aren’t interesting in themselves.