Ages ago, we had the idea for the net.sack; a small rucksack thing with stalk camera and headset mic/earpiece, and decent bandwidth cellphone transmitting it all. So you could rent yourself out to whoever is at the other end of the connexion, and they can watch and direct — for remote shopping, tourism in general, whatever makes sense ethically and/or economically.
That was about 7 years ago…I think now, much more interesting with GPS — ‘hook me into someone THERE’, with there being pretty much anywhere…so it becomes realtime, border-hopping — p2p to people.
and right on the edge of enabling that being simply a checkbox on the settings of any decent modern cellphone with a video camera hookup.
assuming of course that at some point the price of 3G becomes sane
or of course the other more interesting route — mesh network of low power 802.11b or bluetooth descendents…
…of course that would just be shadowing, active control presumes complicity, involvement, a place for this idea to nest in people’s heads…
…and don’t start with the whole gibson loa thing…