Having recently watched the film Surrogates staring Bruce Willis, based in a futuristic world where everyone stays at home and plugs themselves into a device that enables them to control a robotic clone (albeit better looking and flawless) representation of themselves. It really got me thinking on how people do more or less the same thing with social games such as Second Life and how far away we could possibly be from this happening in reality. Having one for everyday use in everything you do would be a bit creepy but having one as a representation of yourself in meetings in distant offices would be pretty cool. Especially if you were an engineer who was needed, say at a plant to fix something you could do it quickly using a surrogate.  So reading Scott's blog posting on Building an Embodied Social Proxy or Crazy Webcam Remote Cart Thing got me thinking, it probably won't be too long until we are using something similar in our offices. It will probably start with video conferencing and then move onto devices that can be controlled by a computer sitting on a robotic cart (laptop). Imagine Microsoft releasing software for this type of application and you had USB devices that were built to compliment it. Maybe they would be MS Social Proxy Certified devices? An MS Social Proxy Cart that carried a laptop that was plugged into it and could control its motors, robotic arms the list goes on... It could start off simple and then progress from there?

Googling a bit more I discovered doctors in some hospitals were already making use of such technology. Controlling six foot tall robots remotely with large plasma screens on the front to display their faces as they visited patients on wards in hospital. It seems as though this could possibly be the start of a new industry? Lets just hope it doesn't stop us from interacting with real people personally as it did in the film Surrogates.