Environment-to-Environment (E2E) Communication

Most communication in early days used to be from a person to another person directly. When technology started mediating communication, devices started playing important role and device to device communication was introduced.  Much of the electronic communication is device to device communication.  A telephone, land or mobile, is connected to another telephone.  Even in video conferencing, a camera is connected to a display.  Obviously one or more persons use a connected device and use it for communication.  The devices are to facilitate communication among people.
Now suppose that in place of just connecting a device to another device, we could connect an environment to another environment.  Where an environment is  a physical environment that is captured using many devices that observe and monitor objects and activities in the environment and in the connected environments objects (people) feel that they are really in a ‘joint’ environment.  We believe that this could be the natural next step in building communication technology that has been evolving.
E2E connectivity can be achieved by placing multiple heterogeneouse sensors (cameras, microphones, infrared, …)  in an environment to detect appropriate objects and events continuously and creating a dynamic situation model of the environment.  This situation model can be used to provide adequate symbolic as well as sensory (experiential) information to users in other environments.  By creating a similar situation model for the other environments, a joint situation model can be prepared that can help in presenting appropriate information in both environments at adequate locations.  This will make interactions among people in different locations much more natural because unlike current device-to-device models, people will be free and natural in their environment and will be able to interact with remote environments as if they are at the same place.