On a historic first moment, Jan Kjällstrom shook the hand of Lloyd Churches. Nothing special about that you might think but considering that Jan was in Irvine, U.S.A and Lloyd was in Melbourne, Australia, that’s quite a long hand to reach so far.

In fact it was much easier because Jan was using the EON Icube, (CAVE) a 4 wall projector based immersive display system connected to a multi-user software that share’s their head position within a virtual world, also known as avatars.

Jan Kjällström, Product Manager for EON Reality said «It really feels like we accomplished something when I could see him moving around and then I reached out and shook his hand».

Lloyd Churches, Applications Development Manager of EON Reality said «That’s one small handshake for eon-man, one giant leap for eon-kind.»

The news pleased Dennis Cafiero, EON Reality’s project manager because it means they are one step closer to completing a major research project in which an EON Icube system will be used to train field operators in a Liquid Natural Gas plant where field operators could log in from anywhere in the world and interact virtually.

The range of software and hardware that went into today’s historic demonstration was extensive. The best part of it was that using Gotomeeting to screen share, Lloyd could see the master computer and therefore verify that his avatar was visible and responding. Then Jan turned on some software so they could see one of the slave computers on the master screen as well and could verify that the avatar was visible there too.