Last autumn I wrote a column reflecting on a visit to the First World War cemeteries of Northern France. The text was drafted while we were stuck in motorway traffic having returned under the Channel on Eurostar.
This time my thoughts are prompted by an Easter break centred around the Normandy landing beaches and sites from the Second World War.
In the interests of balance, were currently stuck on the M3 having driven off a cross-Channel ferry!
Our visit included a couple of museums dedicated to the D-Day landings and the subsequent battle for Normandy. Such facilities aim to achieve at least a degree of telepresence, transporting visitors back in space and time.
It’s interesting to observe the increasing role of technology in achieving this, and the related opportunities for more immediate forms of telepresence such as business conferencing and tele-education.
Every coastal village seemed to have a small D-Day museum, typically at the intersection of the Rue 6th Juin and the Boulevard Eisenhower!
These housed a diversity of physical relics from the battles. They were displayed with reverence, but generally with an absence of narrative or engagement for the casual visitor.
The Memorial for Peace just outside Caen is a more recently opened multi-media experience, again centred around the events of D-Day and the following months.
A strong narrative in pictures and words could perhaps be accused of over-simplifying history, but it achieved much stronger engagement with a minimum of physical artefacts.
Exhibits included wide-screen cinema and multi-channel audio-visual presentations. There was also the only colour footage of the landings, recorded by a US Army film unit.
This made the events depicted seem so much more recent and real, in contrast with the grainy black and white footage which seems to come from an earlier age.
How easily the medium alters our perspective!
However, the Caen Memorial was opened almost a decade ago, and some of the technology was showing its age.
A large dome space was used to achieve interesting audio effects, but there was just a single projected static image.
Contrast this with the possibilities now available with computer-generated images in immersive environments such as the VisionDome. Indeed, there was barely a computer in the entire exhibit.
Advances for telepresence in entertainment applications such as the Caen Memorial or the big theme parks are increasingly driving the component technologies for wider applications.
Mass-market hardware with large development budgets, such as the Sony Playstation, are of even greater significance.
As a telecommunications engineer exploring the future of teleconferencing, its important to track these activities.
It’s also important to note that effective telepresence is about much more than the hardware, the technology nuts and bolts.
A good radio play can be more effective than television in creating atmosphere, since much is left to our imagination.
And in the context of this article, the seemingly endless rows of crosses in the war cemeteries were in many respects more thought provoking and even directly evocative of the battle experience. A strong presence, if not true telepresence.