Stephanie Elam and Jason Kravarik bring us a story about applied communications technology in CNN Style called The Portals Project: This gold box is ‘better than Facebook’.

The Portals Project is the brainchild of Amar Bakshi.

Each shipping container covered in gold paint is connected by a wall-sized video screen to a doppleganger somewhere else in the world — in any of these countries: Afghanistan, Cuba, Germany, Honduras, India, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Mexico, Myanmar, Pakistan, Palestine, Rwanda, South Korea, United Kingdom, and the United States.

“Portals are gold spaces equipped with immersive audiovisual technology. When you enter a Portal, you come face-to-face with someone in a distant Portal live and full-body, as if in the same room.”

The Portals connect strangers from very different backgrounds and allow them to converse and to find common ground.

My take: This sounds like a fantastic use of place, technology and the internet to foster communication between people on opposite sides of the world. I envisioned something similar in the early 90’s called “Central Square”. This was to be a network of camera kiosks set up in large public areas in major cities and available to anyone to make statements to the world. At other times, viewers could simply watch what was going on. Then the internet happened and public webcams.