Below is a transcript of the audio file.

Jonar Nader: Other things are happening in the world of digits so that information is also in digits. Let’s look at three things, he content, context and the infrastructure. If you look at a major newspaper in the world, they have those three things. The infrastructure is huge printing presses, photographers, journalists and everybody out in the field making the thing work. That’s the foundation, the infrastructure of a newspaper. Then up the ladder, we have context, meaning the medium, how does it come to you? It comes on paper. Glossy or otherwise, it is the way it comes to you. And then the content, which is really what we are concerned about; a newspaper’s main objective is content. Well, now in the future, organisations will have to disintegrate and decide where they want to play, they can’t play in all three. So you will have experts in the field of infrastructure, where they don’t worry about the content, they just do the infrastructure, and we see that with the telecommunications companies. For example Telstra and Optus don’t care about what comes through the phone line so much, they actually only sell you the phone line. ABC and people like that only care about the content. They have freelance journalists out there.

Host: So all the technology is about this transfer of information? Hence, the phrase information technology. It is starting to make a little bit of sense at the moment. Is it a threat to jobs as we know it? That seems to be one of the key elements of information technology, that it is drastically changed the workplace, the work role and the work responsibility. Is that going to be a social problem that we are going to have to deal with?

Jonar Nader: It is interesting that you use the word change and I think it is change, not obliterate. Now, when calculators first came into being, they were huge clunky things. Accountants were worried that their jobs would be out, and there were strikes back then. And when typewriters came in, all sorts of people worried about their jobs too, and true, it does do away with some jobs. Before I go into the world of digits and what jobs that will get rid of, let’s first notice although we have lost a lot of jobs on the productions lines, in dangerous places and in office environments, other new jobs have been created. The police now have computer crime units, which never existed and no one would have thought that you would have a whole police force around the world including CERN the computer emergency response units around the world coping with computer crime, a whole new industry. Doctors and lawyers have a whole new branch called ergonomics and IT specialisation in law and health. So new jobs are being created. So what’s going to happen in the world of digits, is that first you have to have what is called disintermediation. Disintermediation takes place when somebody is not doing their job as quickly as somebody else can do it. Like, gas use to come in a bottle and the person who used to deliver the bottle has been disintermediated because the gas can come straight to your home.

Host: It is a big word.

Jonar Nader: Yes, disintermediation is, and your objective as a business person is to re-intermediate yourself and find out what ways you can create a new virtual value so that there is value in what you are offering. Take for example the people who cut your ticket to send you overseas, a travel agent. They can very well be disintermediated if you can buy your own ticket from the airline.

Host: Which is a possibility.

Below is a transcript of the audio file.

Jonar Nader: Now there is another thing called simultaneous art. Remember last time when we spoke about robots? We said that robots could be virtually like a sumo wrestler, and they now have sumo wrestler robots who are not remotely controlled, but they have their own intelligence to fight their own game, just as a chess machine fights its own game, well this one is done with brute force. Well that is one area. What if you had a whole group of people on the internet, each assuming the role of a robot for say one or two minutes a piece and you, through telepresence can control the sumo wrestlerrobot. Well there is now art on the internet where you can have the brush in the robots hand and then everyone can watch what you do.

Host: So, for example, you could compete in a tennis tournament, even tho you haven’t got tennis skills or physical fitness, but you might have the mental skills to play this, so you could be up against someone else in a teleprescence format?

Jonar Nader: Yes that is true. Now what you are suggesting there with tennis is possible with golf, etc, assuming tho that the machine at the other end can play the tennis for you. In teleprescence, unlike virtual reality, there is no existance of the environment in which you are playing it is all inside the computer program. That is virtual reality. It is created by the computer and the computer speed.

Host: It is false, isn’t it?

Jonar Nader: Correct. But teleprescence is very real, so you just have to have a robot at the other end who can actually so what you want it to do, whether it is fix a space craft or play tennis for you. And you will find that entertainment is one of the biggest areas where this technology can be. You can now be somewhere, go somewhere, become familiar.

Host: Front row seats at the Tyson Hollyfield fight for five minutes.

Jonar Nader: Yes. Notice this memo here from the 1991 Onterio teleprescence project, where they spend $7 000 000 for a period of two or three years, where they were trying to see how they could bring telepresence into the home. The memo read “in the next teleprescence meeting which will be held on Friday 26th February at noon, Toronto people can attend in person at the University of Toronto. The emphasis being that those people who are being so engrossed in teleprescence find it necessisary to say that a meeting which you must attend in person. So in person now becomes, IP if you wish, becomes just as important as TP, because you have to differentiate whether you are here or there or not at all.

Host: Whether you are there or whether you are not, and you might have a better view if you are not there, I think. It is interesting, as you say it may become a part of our lives very soon.

Below is a transcript of the audio file.

Jonar Nader: There are great uses for it beyond the labs, the notion of teleprescence.

Host: Such as?

Jonar Nader: Well, leisure. Nothing in this world has been so well accepted unless you an find something humorous to do with it. So you could have perhaps a balloon go up in space and a camera at the bottom with total rotation capability, you put on a head set and you head becomes virtually a joystick that moves the camera at the bottom of the balloon, the balloon goes up above, say the football ground or the cricket field, or somewhere more dangerous like Niagra Falls, and you can therefore immerse yourself in this and be apart of the action. So you become your own camera man in a function.

Host: Now I see. So for example, if they put a camera in the middle stump of a cricket pitch, you could choose that point of vision.

Jonar Nader: Yes, I mean you can choose. Take for example handicapped people may be able to use it because they will be able to see places they would not normally get to. But also busy people can get there. I mean, why go all the way to England to watch the cricket, when you have got television? But with television, you have limitations to what the camera man shows you or what the studio shows you, here you can have your very own representative, The Kevin Blimp, and you will know that whenever the camera is moving, is whenever your head is moving to watch.

Below is a transcript of the audio file.

Jonar Nader: Marketing people can do virtually what they like. Take for example a TV show like neighbours. That used to be on one TV station and failed. Well it failed because the marketing team didn’t work properly, then they swapped stations and they all said “you’re crazy, why are you taking a flop of a TV show?” and it became a world wide hit. Similarly with technology like HDTV, none of your friends have one or mine have one , but lots of money has been spend on HDTV and I can tell you they are not going to let go of it, they are going to pursue with it until it works, because too much money has gone down the drain for that. So whether we like it or not we will have HDTV. Whether they change its name or otherwise, it will still be there.

Host: So what about the new polymer glass computer screens that you can fold up into your pocket. Are we also going to have that marketed effectively and efficiently and we will then have something to rival the paper back?

Jonar Nader: That is a good one actually. IBM is currently working on this technology. The idea in the past was to improve the resolution because the screen that you look at can really wreck your eyes and it is so hard to read, and pen and paper is so much better. So why don’t we create a pen and paper look on a screen, and the 14, 15, 17 and 21 inch screens, the bigger you go, the more likely it is to implode, because there is a vacuum inside a tube, it is called a cafada rae tube, and if that tube gets any bigger the air pressure inside and outside is far too great. So what they thought was, rather then make it bigger we will make it smaller so they created this polymer plastic device, and initially they were thinking of folding it, because it is like a glass or liquid crystal display. Now, just like we carry mobile phones on our belt, it is possible that we will carry this rolled up device on our belt. Is it Robin Hood that carried a rolled up thing on his back? So it is possible too.

Host: It had arrows in it.

Jonar Nader: Yes, that is right. These things are all possible but you will find that it will take 10 years to finish prototype and go into something decent. And you can not have something going on for 10 years because the world will surpass you. And that is why at the moment, you find the technologies that do work well are those that are developed in collaboration with, for example, they used to fight in the olden days about whether it was BETA or VHS. BETA was the better technology, we all knew that, but VHS won over its marketing mix and the dollars that it had thrown at it. And similarly, we had new DA-Tapes, and they didn’t take off so well. We have had better technology then CD-Rom for years, but nobody wanted to push it because too much money has gone down the drain on that one and we want to get our money’s worth before we tell people “hey you know that music we have been listening to is not very good music at all because we can give you something ten times better” and same with this polymer device, by the time it is don’t there will be something so much better that unless IBM works in collaboration with Toshiba and Fujitsu and all the major brands they will out do it, and that is the shame of it. Furthermore, take the Newton device. Remember the Newton from Apple? Hand held device, personal digital assistant. I say I have a personal analogue assistant, which is a human being, you know my PAA instead of my PDA. This DPA is a fantastic product, and in itself is perfect, but what do you plug into it, so as a hardware company, you have to convince the software companies to produce a product for you. It is a bit like if I produce the world’s best car but I can’t get Dunlop to produce tyres for me, it is useless. So hardware and software companies have to collaborate. But they are at such log ahead at the moment, they are just killing each other in wall street that there is very little collaboration, so the end used, you and I have to suffer with what we are given.

Below is a transcript of the audio file.

Host: Some years ago, one of your many predictions, there will be a thing called a body scanner which will measure us in every possible dimension, in other words it will produce a computer image of our size, and this could be used to order clothes for example. And that is then sent off to a retailer and they send back perfectly fitting clothes. I heard a story during the week, that there is a British company that is about to do this.

Jonar Nader: Yes, the idea being that you can buy books and CD’s over the internet beautifully and you can read then and listen to them but how do you buy a shirt that is comfortable and is going to fit you and there are in fact companies out there who are making customised jeans, but how do you know what shape you are? And this is just being developed, and in fact the British government has just put $6 000 000 towards research to this firm. And you walk into this booth that looks like a phone booth or photo booth and it scans about 300 000 points in your body and eventually all that equates to a size so you can then buy jeans and try them on and look at your avatar and look at yourself wearing this product so that if you are buxom or big on the hips or whatever, and see if it fits you, and then you can order it with some confidence.

Host: I like the idea, because after all, because after the many years of searching for jeans because they come in three sizes, the leg size, you know long, regular and short, and I buy the short ones and still have to take them up about two and a half inches.

Jonar Nader: Yes that is true, in fact a jeans company was offering and still is offering customised jeans, but people haven’t caught on to it yet because they don’t know what size to tell the computer to send, but with this way they can be confident.

Below is a transcript of the audio file.

Jonar Nader: Well what is happening and the worst thing that can happen is tele-sickness and cyber-sickness, we didn’t touch on that.

Host: Oh, you get sick from it.

Jonar Nader: Well if the delay coming to you is six minutes, six minutes actually doesn’t make you sea sick, I tell you what makes you cyber-sick, it is the microsecond delay, a 280 microsecond delay in your head set and what is coming through, can cause nausea, discomfort, dizziness, and dizzy spells.

Host: I know exactly what you mean, often when I speak to people in other studios, and if they are heading themselves back a quarter of a second later, it throws them.

Jonar Nader: Yes, I have had that happen to me, I have had to take the headsets out and just speak blindly.

Host: Alright Jonar, thanks for that, we will catch up with you later to talk virtual reality.