Today, in spite of advanced video con­fer­enc­ing, shared vir­tu­al envi­ron­ments, and gam­ing envi­ron­ments such as Sec­ond Life, it is still sim­ply much more effi­cient to phys­i­cal­ly trav­el to remote loca­tion for busi­ness, sci­en­tif­ic or fam­i­ly meetings—even if at a huge envi­ron­men­tal, ener­getic and oppor­tu­ni­ty cost.

The sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy devel­oped in BEAMING will for the first time give peo­ple a real sense of phys­i­cal­ly being in a remote loca­tion with oth­er peo­ple, and vice versa—without actu­al­ly travelling.

BEAMING is a four year FP7 EU col­lab­o­ra­tive project which start­ed on Jan 1st 2010.

BEAMING rais­es a num­ber of eth­i­cal and legal issues that are famil­iar from exist­ing vir­tu­al real­i­ty and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions technologies.It also rais­es sev­er­al nov­el issues.

You can read more here.