Skype banned in UAE? Just teleport yourself to chat with loved ones

Dubai - You can even play back the meeting as a memory.

Forget Facebook, Skype and Snapchat, a professor in Dubai believes "HoloPortation" will be the new social media craze in less than a decade.

The honorary professor at Amity University and founder of Dubai Solar Schools, David Provenzani, said humans will be able to teleport anywhere through holographic figures of themselves. The virtual meetings can be recorded, which means users can send or "post" their interactions to other humans, and play it back as "memories".

Microsoft has already invented a programme as such, where a staff member got to interact with his daughter through HoloPortation. He recorded their entire interaction and played it back.

"This will help with communicating with people that are physically distant to us. HoloPortation is an example from Microsoft and I can suspect that, within five to seven years, we will have technology that we can apply to our house and HoloPort ourselves in another room, to have a meeting, to talk or to interact with family and friends," Provenzani told Khaleej Times at the sidelines of the "A Journey to the World of 2040" conference by Amity University.

"I would suppose this would be the new social network. So, now we use Facebook, where we share photos and videos, but in the future, we will post our HoloPortation sessions because you can record them and play them back as memories."

Because the holographs are 3-D images, the Microsoft employee was also able to zoom-in and out of the holographs, making him and his daughter appear much smaller and easier to view. However, users can also keep the holographs to human-size.

Provenzani gave a presentation to high school students at the event, where he spoke about how life would be like in 2025 and beyond.

He said the youth have to focus on career paths that require human emotions.

"All of the works that require manual efforts, would be replaced by machines. Our suggestion today is to direct the careers towards fields that still require emotion, ethics and typical characteristics of human beings," he said, adding that robots can have emotions in the next two decades, however, humans still dominate that area.

"So, you can become a great lawyer, but study the new rules for mobility, where driverless cars will be introduced. You can become a structural engineer, but you have to consider what materials of the future will be. You can become a technician or a designer of cars and phones, but you will have to consider how these items will be in the next two decades. All careers based in business developments, marketing, public relations will still be for humans. I would suggest for youth to choose careers that would require personal interaction instead of automation.

"The students of today have to consider what will be the change within the next five, ten and 20 years. Of course, we will have many disruptive changes in many important fields that are part of our personal lives, working life and even educational life. Particularly, we have artificial intelligence, big data, internet of things and mobility."

sarwat@khaleejtimes.com