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+
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.
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.
This is neat, I hope one day similar structures are placed in cities around the globe, and it helps ease tension that builds so easily online.
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.
Yea...if it's countries with tensions, people will start mooning the portal and worse hahaha
> countries with tensions, people will start mooning the portal
would make for a beautiful realisation
"how petty our differences become, when we realize we all use the same butt"
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.
I believe there’s precedent for Americans mooning Austrailia.
https://youtu.be/YkcVzNyj5sI?si=XXY3dnm8WPrmmbu0
Americans & Brits making fun of each other through a portal would be pretty neat haha
Super cool! I would love to see a ring of these leading to all different countries. Really interesting way to connect countries together.
That would be fun. How do you imagine the “ring”? A huge part of the appeal is that both sides can see each other.
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 :-)
Not the op, but I could imagine a series of portals in a circle formation at each site; maybe like 12 or 13 simulcast connections would be insane.
My thought was a circle/semicircle with portals on the outside angled such that other portals are not in the backgrounds of the video.
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.
Does it do audio too?
I wonder what the resolution and frame rate is too?
Article was lacking technical detail.
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.
Needs gesture recognition to trigger Stargate portal easter egg, https://youtube.com/watch?v=0WvN3Ji-xIQ
Locations: https://www.portals.org/portals
Why are none of the photos actually of Flatiron?
(I don't know Dublin well enough to tell if any of them are of the Dublin side.)
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.
https://old.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/1cn9cxl/portal_to_dubl...
Thank you! Very cool, and good to see exactly where it's located.
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.
"A sculpture known as The Portal is heading to NYC’s Flatiron neighborhood"
Seems you might be thinking of a specific building instead
> (I don't know Dublin well enough to tell if any of them are of the Dublin side.)
Doesn't look like it.
An artist set something similar up between NYC and London in 2008 — was always fun to walk by.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/arts/design/21tele.html
I remember that one too. Fulton st landing.
It had a steam punky kind of look.
https://www.artichoke.uk.com/project/the-telectroscope/
That's exactly what I thought of. It's cool but it's been done. The telectroscope had a fun story too.
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].
[1] https://www.sharedstudios.com/
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portals_(initiative)
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.
I wonder when we'll have light field capturing and emitting surfaces that would make it look like a real hole between places...
With support from the Simons Foundation: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2024/05/08/announcing-porta...
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 walk by this location regularly. VERY open to goofy ideas and harmless shenanigans.
Awesome! There’s a really cool company in Japan doing something similar for enterprise: https://tonari.no/en
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+
I don't know why it would be any different from a Zoom call.
In reality it's probably even faster since neither side is dealing with Wi-Fi.
It doesn't say what technology is used, does it? Could be using wifi, or cell networks.
4 replies →
Why 1/30th?
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.
2 replies →
> Why 1/30th? > Latency will be far more than that due to speed of light.
1/30th of 1s is almost exactly the round-trip time from NYC to Dublin (Wolfram Alpha says 17ms one-way).
I wonder the same. I already take issue with the use of "realtime" in the marketing material.
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.
Would you consider zoom call with someone on the other side of an ocean "realtime"?
If so, I don't see how this is any different. If not, that's a pretty narrow definition of realtime given the context.
Imagine a transatlantic Zoom call off your laptop camera and home wifi. Not great. I have seen this Portal in person.
I wonder how long it will be before we realize we can't have nice things.
In the meantime, this seems cool!
is Dublin becoming more of a cultural center since Brexit?
Brexit? The British left Dublin 102 years ago.
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.
there are portals ...
I hope this helps manifest a real portal but yeah JetBlue may disagree (i.e. unmanifest)
That was an ad in the beginning, right?
So that JetBlue can sell more credit cards? https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/airlines-b...
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Well, yes, but you didn’t, did you.
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.
Is Facebook going to complain about trademarks?