Meet the future of tele­por­ta­tion –

Well, Wal­lace and Gromit are the inspi­ra­tion for it at least.

Pro­fes­sors Todd Mowry and Seth Gold­stein of Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­sity came up with an inter­est­ing take on tele­por­ta­tion based on stop-action clay animation.

“We thought that a good anal­ogy for what we were going to do was clay­ma­tion – some­thing like the Wal­lace and Gromit shows,” Dr Mowry told BBC World Service’s Out­look programme.

What these two guys dreamed up was a novel solu­tion to a sci-fi problem.

(The pro­fes­sors) think that, within a human gen­er­a­tion, we might be able to repli­cate three-dimensional objects out of a mass of mate­r­ial made up of small syn­thetic “atoms”.Cameras would cap­ture the move­ment of an object or per­son and then this data would be fed to the atoms, which would then assem­ble them­selves to make up an exact like­ness of the object.

Pro­fes­sor Gold­stein has envi­sioned that, even­tu­ally, the objects will be built with “nano-dust” – tiny objects that can be pro­grammed to bind to each other and move – but cur­rently they are try­ing to build at a much larger scale, work­ing with objects the size of table-tennis balls.

Their orig­i­nal plan was for the appli­ca­tion to work in face-to-face interaction.

The tech­nol­ogy mir­rors that used to cre­ate the char­ac­ter of Gol­lum.
“I’m in Pitts­burgh, and you’re in Lon­don. How do we make that hap­pen?” Dr Mowry said.

“We can’t tele­port some­body – nobody’s going to travel any­where – but if we’re in our own rooms a sys­tem of cam­eras will cap­ture exactly what’s in each room.”

Inter­est­ing. And very cool. 0111001101101011011010010110010101110011 is ‘skies’ in binary. Digital=binary. Get it? Get it? No, you prob­a­bly didn’t get it.