HERITAGE
Principals
The principals involved in the Telepresence Technologies have a long history of hardware and software development predating their joint efforts. See the bios of Steve Bress and Jim Dunstan for a fuller discussion of their backgrounds. Working together since 1993, the team has remained focused on developing real hardware and software that allow users to:
- Experience remote environments both virtual and real;
- Learn about distant worlds;
- Interact with computers utilizing different senses;
- Interact with real robots.
Return To The Moon® — 1993
As founding members of Lunar Eclipse Software, the Team helped create Return to the Moon®. An early entry in the PC CD-ROM market, this "edutainment" product truly was cutting edge. Noted SciFi author and software reviewer Jerry Pournelle named Return To The Moon® his CD-ROM of the month in Byte Magazine, July, 1995, declaring, "if you have any interest in the moon, this is for you."
The CD-ROM included the Moonflight Simulator, which was the first program under Windows to be able to run a video file forward and backwards. The Moonflight Simulator coupled actual lunar landing physics with archived Apollo landing footage to provide a unique interactive experience for the time. To display over 300 images, sound and video files contained on the disk, Return To The Moon® also contained a version of the VideoShow software adapted from the same software used by NASA to display pictures from the Hubble Telescope and for the Challenger Investigation. The Electronic Lunar Atlas allowed users to study each mission to the Moon (both U.S. and Soviet) by clicking on the landing sites. LunaCorp purchased Lunar Eclipse Software in 1994.
Mission: Planet EarthTM — 1994
For LunaCorp's 1994 Mission: Planet Earth, team members created "PlanetView," a program that overlaid space imagery on the first cloudless image of the Earth.
Les Krantz of CD-ROMs Rated ranked "Mission: Planet Earth" second of ten Atlas programs reviewed with a score of 81.60 out of 100.
Atacama Desert Trek with Carnegie Mellon University — 1997
Telepresence Technology principals teamed with Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute to help design the Nomad robot which was sent to the Atacama Desert in Chile to demonstrate long duration autonomous navigation capabilities. Nomad itself was a full-size version of the rover LunaCorp intended to send to the Moon's equator. LunaCorp arranged for the satellite link to bring real-time telemetry back from the desert, and utilizing the six degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) motion platform system from ViRtogo, fed the motion data from Nomad live into the platform, for the first ever transportation of motion cues between continents in real-time.
This activity also provide the team with its first taste of MultiSenseTM — the introduction of senses beyond just sight and sound to the interactive environment.
Lunar DefenseTM Motion Platform Arcade Game — 1998
To increase its experience in combining visual, motion, and sound cues, in 1998, the Team developed the first motion platform arcade game designed to run on a standard PC, Lunar DefenseTM.
Moonroll — 1999
For LunaCorp, Team members developed a voxel-based graphics engine that tied into a motion platform, so the driver felt every bump on the computer-generated landscape. The "Moonroll" program was featured on a number of television programs chronicling LunaCorp's efforts to fly the first private mission to the moon to explore for ice deposits at the lunar poles. Stand alone units were designed for sale into the museum and science center market.
TXP-1: Telepresence eXperimental Portal No. 1 — 2000
In 2000, team principals completed construction of a fully enclosed test chamber for LunaCorp, dubbed Telepresence Experimental Portal No. 1 ("TXP-1").
A user can be closed inside TXP-1 and once there either control a simulated rover over the voxel generated landscape, or drive a scale model rover on the adjacent moonyard. Work is progressing toward the completion of TXP-2, a more stylized enclosure that also will be available to the museum and science center market.
Below are three video clips which show the computer-controlled rovers built by the Telepresence Technologies team for LunaCorp. These were designed as part of a museum exhibit. The rovers are controlled by the driver inside the TXP-1, and demonstrate the basic functionality of computer controlled rovers.
