Telepresence Coming to a Home Near You, And Soon

It’s only a matter of time before realtors start taking out-of-town clients (or for that matter folks from across the city) through homes (and offices or shops-for-lease) without them having to leave their chairs. Vivek Burhanpurkar’s company Magnavision.net aims to be among the first to do it with its live 2-way property viewing system.

Here’s what Vivek told me about it, “It’s kind of a Beam me over Scotty thing. Magnavision allows realtors to physically walk through a place while interactively giving clients a live guided tour of the home. Clients can be anywhere; they just need a smartphone, tablet or laptop. It’s near HD quality and there’s no learning curve for clients. Cool, huh?”

Yep.

The beta is launching soon and realtors can try it out by signing up with Vivek here: https://www.magnavision.net/signup.php.

I suggested to Mr Burhanpurkar that his system should also work well in military, police, entertainment and sports industries. Hey, maybe you could go to a Sens game and live curate a hockey match for a friend who couldn’t be with you. Now if everyone did that, maybe pro sports teams and their broadcasters would object, but it certainly is consistent with what is happening everywhere else–putting the power to be a publisher/content creator in the hands of the masses. It’s quite liberating, I assure you.

I can’t wait for the day (being a bit of a lazy real estate broker myself) when Vivek gets together with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ drones to make it possible for both the realtor and the client to beam in from their offices or home offices, and do guided tours together with the help of a mechanical drone flying through a place careful not to knock over any of Granny’s precious porcelain figurines.

Of course, that will take big advances in AI as well as control, flight and propulsion systems before we can really let drones loose. I wrote a whole trilogy on AI. Adding QEs (quantum entities) to flying drones would certainly make them safe workhorses.

I like the idea well enough that in my next novel (Urban Nirvana and the Peradventures of Maddy Henderson), I’m going to add smart drones and telepresence to the technological undercoat of that society (circa 2030). I am not going to tell you now, but these drones will have unique propulsion systems and some amazing capabilities.

More later.

@ Prof Bruce

Postscript:

Subsequently, Vivek told me that RE/MAX pilot tested Magnavision and even though it is still in Beta, they liked it so much that they plan to introduce it to their agents across the US and Canada mainly because, within the first week of their pilot, one brokerage was able to sell two properties to foreign buyers without having them fly-in for a physical tour.