Last week at Mobile World Congress (MWC), Ericsson Research demonstrated remote controlling of a real Excavator over mobile networks. The application has been built by the OpenWebRTC team and uses OpenWebRTC to send (3D) audio, video and data from Eskilstuna, Sweden to Barcelona. The MWC visitors sit in an actual machine chair with levers, wearing a pair of Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles as well as headphones with 3D audio.
We will soon publish a longer blog post detailing the different technical challenges involved in this extreme project. In the meantime, here is a video that gives a good overview: