When it comes to technology, prognosticating can be as terrifying as it can be exciting. This weekend I watched Solid State Society, the new Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex anime movie, and was appropriately chilled. But then there's news that my fellow Canucks are working to bring one of the cooler (and usually less scary) bits of science-fiction future tech to reality: Star Trek's holodeck.

The project is called iTRAnCE (Immersive TelePresence Room ANd Collaborative Environment), and it's a joint venture between the University of Alberta's Advanced Man-Machine Interface Laboratory, TRLabs and Hewlett-Packard's HPLabs. The aim is to create 3D projections of people from remote locations as sort of the next generation in videoconferencing. The resolution is to be so high that, according to the CBC News article that tipped me to the whole thing, you'll be able to see "an eye twitch or a bead of sweat," and other bits of non-verbal communication that we take for granted in face-to-face discussion. (Or most of us, anyway.)

While lead researcher Pierre Boulanger touts the productivity benefits of such a system, I can only think of the many ways it can be abused, at the very least for countless practical jokes. I, for one, can't wait.

[via PC World]