John’s vision 11
EXTRACT: TELEPRESENCE
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Presence researchers are testing myriad ways for us to interact with virtual worlds in this ‘fakespace’ race: Computerized clothing that recognizes physical gestures; accelerometers that track movements of the body; sensors that track eye movements (first developed by shop designers); joysticks that allow interaction with 3-D bats, or wands; feedback systems that measure force, pressure, or vibration; remote operation systems that translate human movements into the control of machinery. With so-called haptic interface devices, you feel the motion, shape, resistance, and surface texture of simulated objects.Telerobotic manipulators, that incorporate actuation, sensor, and control technologies, permit us to achieve dexterous manipulation of virtual objects.
Sound is also being designed - for acoustigraphic environments in which 3-D sound is combined with stereoscopic vision; you hear the sounds of traffic in the distance and wind rustling the leaves of nearby trees. A Displaced Temperature Sensing System enables you to feel the temperature of a remote location - real or unreal - as if you were there.
Down the line, technology developers promise that they will build face-to-face teleportals wherein we will wear headsets, incorporating projective displays, that will allow us to view 3D, stereoscopic, video-based images of the face of remote participants. Developers promise that tiny micro-lasers will soon scan pictures directly onto the retina of the eye - an effect already experienced by military pilots. A company called Cyberware has developed 3d whole-body scanners which create representations of people - avatars - that can act for corporeal people in “inhabited information spaces”. The business plan is that you’ll be scanned in AvatarBooths - as happens now with passport photographs in railway stations. Having digitised your body, you’ll send it out into the internet on your behalf where it will meet and hang out with other avatars. The project was was nicknamed Immortality R Us by fellow researchers.
Other researchers dream of scaling up such effects to create virtual electronic crowds. A project in Europe called eRENA focussed on the development of information spaces inhabited jointly by udience members, performers and artists who would explore, interact, communicate with one another and participate in staged events. eRENA brought together digital artists, experts in multi-user virtual reality and computer animation, social scientists, broadcasters, experts in CAVEs and other projected interfaces, networking expertise, spatial technologies and novel artistic content.
Ishii points out that the human eye has something like 40 million receptors in it. Many millions more receptors are to be found in our ears, up out noses, in our skin and on our tongues. (There are dense clusters of receptors elsewhere on the body, too - but this is a family readership, so I will not dwell on those).
Even if you could capture the smells, sounds, tastes, and feel of a place, digitise them, and send them down a wire - you’d still never get near the sensation of Being There. Why? Because we humans are not so dumb. Our minds and out bodies are one intelligence. We’d just know, that’s why.
Subliminal perception, perception that occurs without conscious awareness, is not an anomaly, but the norm. Nonverbal communication makes up the bulk of information flow between individuals. Most of what we perceive in the world comes not from conscious observation but from a continuous process of unconscious scanning. We somehow filter out the majority of incoming signals so that our lives can flow more easily. We are not aware of most of our experience. During any given second, we consciously process only sixteen of the eleven million bits of information that our senses pass on to our brains. The conscious part of us receives much less information than the unconscious part of us.
This is why information and communication technology simply cannot and will not recreate what it is like to be in a meeting with people somewhere else. People, who have bodies, cannot inhabit virtual space. Hubert Dreyfus, a philosophy professor, puts it more poetically: “Tele-hugs won’t do it” he says, “because telepresence is an oxymoron. Even the most sophisticated forms of telepresence feel abstract because they are not connected with our sense of warm embodied nearness we experienced as babies in our caretaker’s arms”.
From movement to mood
Telepresence may suck, but sustainabiity demands that we compromise. As I explained in the chapter on mobility, the biosphere cannot support the perpetually growing movement of goods and bodies around the world. We have to make the best we can of mediated presence - but there are more interesting tasks for design than the use of brute bandwidth to achieve ‘Being There’ verisimilitude. The communication quality of cyberspace can be enhanced by artful and indirect means.
Some interaction designers take a more poetic and multi-dimensional approach. In a project called The Poetics of Telepresence two English designers, Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby, looked at the potential of fusing physical and telematic space. They were Inspired by the social science of proxemics; this looks at how different spatial relationships - standing close, standing apart, eavesdropping - change the tenor of the ways we communicate. Dunne and Raby asked themselves, why should videoconferencing always be face to face? why limit contact to speech, or sight? They went on to use radio to trigger heat devices remotely. Temperature is highly evocative of the body, and they thought making an area warm might suggest an intimate atmosphere of co-presence with another body, I particularly liked the idea of a “hot air” button on my telephone, so I could politely let the person at the other end know she or he was talking nonsense.
In Italy, design researchers in a project called Faraway also looked at long distance communication between loved ones who are physically distant, but emotionally close. The team, based at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, explored what happens when gesture, expressions, heartbeat, breathing, alpha- and beta-rythm informnation are incorporated into long-distance communication. The idea was to increase the sense of presence of a loved person over distance - but indirectly.
During face-to-face communication, our body acts as a medium that transforms our internal emotions into external signals: actions, expressions, gestures, postures, attitudes, voice intonation. Other physiological manifestations such as blood pressure, heart rate, pupillary responses, also work more than we reaalise - but mainly in close proximity through direct physical contact or special monitoring devices. The Faraway team used heat to help participants experience the warmth of DistantOne: a sender activates a “bean” by touch which heats up and sends that information to a bean held by the other. Anothert aplication, Heart: allows someone to share his or her heartbeat with another.
Creating meaningful and aesthetic combinations of sight, sound, and touch in a virtual world is a complex engineering and design task. In the same way that we perceive that a voice is coming from the ventriloquist’s dummy, visual cues can override small technical discrepancies.
But artifice does not just mean tools. Peter Higgins, a British designer of museum exhibits and entertainment complexes, says we need to focus more on the ‘script’ of a situation, and less on the technology.Engagement, involvement, and psychological immersion are more likely to occur, says Higgins, if the orchestration of objects, events, and/or people is inforrmed by an engaging and believable storyline - even if it is not ‘real’.
The scriptwriter-designer has an array of non-tech tools to use. Metaphors, for example, are essential to human understanding. When thoughtfully added into the ‘script’ of a presence situation, metaphors can trigger us into having a clear mental model of what to expect from a particular application. The desktop metaphor on our computer screeen is one of the most widely-known examples. What we see is not really a desk, but it enables us to organise our thoughts and actions well enough. If the metaphor is functional, we will tolerate clunky mixed-modal operations.
A presence scriptwriter might also include specially meaningful objects in the ‘story’. The aura of an original art work, for example, can provide a spur to imaginative engagement wth a situation. Or think of the Roman Cathollc tradition of icons: these inanimate objects are sacred because they represent an ideal to be honoured. icons are aids to devotion; other kinds of objects could surely help us imagine another to be close. Even prosaic objects can do the job. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote a celebrated essay about “Kissing the picture of one’s beloved”. When we kiss a photograph we do not expect to conjour up a spectacular manifestation of the person in the picture represents - but the action is nonetheless satisfying. Evolutionary psycholosts believe that magical ways of thinking may be hardwired into us, and cite as evidence the human capacty to invest inanimate objects with meaning…souvenirs, heirlooms, chldhood toys, objets d’art, dolls, totems, talsmans, and charms.
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