The Portals organization has just inaugurated a sculpture placed in the middle of the street. His particuliarity ? It allows you to see and speak live with people very far away in the world.
Although we live in countries sometimes separated by thousands of kilometers, communicating with them has never been so simple. You can make a phone call of course, or use one of the many videoconferencing services like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and others. As long as you manage to accommodate a possible time difference, there is no shortage of solutions. But isn’t spontaneity a little lacking? It was perhaps this question that gave birth to Portals (unrelated to Sony’s device).
This organization founded by Benediktas Gylys developed several sculptures of the same name, “[…] invitations to meet other humans beyond borders and prejudices and to discover our home – planet Earth – as it really is: united and indivisible“. This philosophy is translated very concretely by the installation of portals in different countries around the world. They take the form of a large ring in which a screen is embedded broadcasting in real time what it “sees” in another country. It therefore virtually connects two.
A video portal lets you talk with people on a street thousands of miles away
For example, by standing in front of the last “portal” set up at New Yorkyou see people walking down the street at the same time at Dublin, more than 5,000 km away. A microphone allows you to speak with them in real time and offers a new form of interaction. Beyond the artistic aspect of the thing, the portals are a real technological feat. They must ensure a permanent and latency-free broadcast of a video stream resource-intensive. The necessary Internet connection must therefore be fast and above all very secure to avoid possible hacking.
Currently, there are 4 portals: Vilnius in Lithuania, Lublin in Poland, New York and to Dublin. The organization’s teams intend to open others in the future. For the moment, they do not allow you to cross them to instantly find yourself in the city connected in the manner of the stargate in the Stargate series. Damage.