Telelife: The Future of Remote Living

Abstract

In recent years, everyday activities such as work and socialization have steadily shifted to more remote and virtual settings. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the switch from physical to virtual has been accelerated, which has substantially affected various aspects of our lives, including business, education, commerce, healthcare, and personal life. This rapid and large-scale switch from in-person to remote interactions has revealed that our current technologies lack functionality and are limited in their ability to recreate interpersonal interactions. To help address these limitations in the future, we introduce "Telelife," a vision for the near future that depicts the potential means to improve remote living better aligned with how we interact, live and work in the physical world. Telelife encompasses novel synergies of technologies and concepts such as digital twins, virtual prototyping, and attention and context-aware user interfaces with innovative hardware that can support ultrarealistic graphics, user state detection, and more. These ideas will guide the transformation of our daily lives and routines soon, targeting the year 2035. In addition, we identify opportunities across high-impact applications in domains related to this vision of Telelife. Along with a recent survey of relevant fields such as human-computer interaction, pervasive computing, and virtual reality, the directions outlined in this paper will guide future research on remote living.

Metameric Varifocal Holograms

“…In recent years, improving display technology to enable lifelike three-dimensional visuals has attracted much attention from industry and academia as displays are crucial for future Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) [33]. An emerging trend, Computer-Generated Holography (CGH) [47], promises such realistic visuals in the nextgeneration of displays [29].…”

Perceptually guided computer-generated holography

“…Enhancing display technology to enable perceptually three-dimensional images has attracted much attention from relevant scientific communities as displays are essential for future Human-Computer Interaction. 1 As an emerging trend, Computer-Generated Holography (CGH) promises to improve visuals in the next generation displays 2 while enabling novel applications and experiences. [3][4][5] Unlike conventional displays, pixelated images are not sent to holographic displays directly.…”

Beaming displays: towards displayless augmented reality near-eye displays

“…Thus, augmented reality near-eye displays could play a key role in arriving at new human-computer interactions that could positively impact our societies. 11 However, there are technical challenges and obstacles in achieving compact form factors while equipping an augmented reality display near-eye displays with necessary optical components, sensors, power banks, and computational resources.…”