Remote Cricket

A recent edition of the Gadget Show on Channel 5 showed a wired-up operator remotely operating a mechanical hand. The presenter demonstrated how he could catch a ball in this remote hand by closing his fingers, and looked forward to the day when Andrew Flintoff would be able to take a catch in a test match being played in Sydney while actually staying in London. Already, he said, surgeons are able to operate remotely using similar techniques, and NASA is building special space suits so that the astronauts of the future will operate remote replicas of themselves while they stay safely on Earth.

The remote astronaut scenario is clearly going to be challenging to the point of ludicrous if they mean allowing someone to perceive and react to an environment on a planet several light minutes away. But the remote test match sounds more credible until you stop to work out how long Andrew Flintoff has to respond if he's going to take a slip catch. If the ball comes off the bat at 120km/h, it's going 33 metres a second. It will take around a third of a second to reach Andrew's Avatar in Sydney, but he would have to judge its trajectory (from the delayed remote video image) in much less than half that time, and then move to intercept it at the first point where it was reachable, knoiwing that his avatar would only move some time in the future. The satellite delay to Australia can be well over a second, and even if you ping Australia through the Internet you get a round trip delay of about a third of a second.

Playing cricket through a remotely wired avatar would be a weird experience. You'd be seeing and responding to the world as it was around third of a second ago, knowing that any response would only take effect in around a third of a second from now. Facing a fast bowler where the ball only takes about a seond and a half to reach you from the bowler's hand would therefore be tricky. The bowler - even if he's a remote one - wouldn't have quite the same problem. He wouldn't be able to respond to the batsmen's exact position, but otherwise his main problem would be guessing when to stop his run up to avoid no-balls.