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When My Avatar Went to Work

A robot surrogate took my place at the office. Here’s why one may take yours, too

By Erico Guizzo  /  September 2010

As I come down the hallway, heads start popping out of cubicles and offices, all eyes turning in my direction. Some of my colleagues laugh, some frown. One looks terrified and flees. That’s what happens, I suppose, when you show up at the office as a robot.

The robot is acting as my stand-in at work. For a week last spring, it roamed around IEEE Spectrum‘s New York City office while I sat in my pajamas at home in Brooklyn. From my laptop, over the Net, I could steer the robot, peer through its cameras, and talk to my colleagues. It’s a bit like a video game, but instead of a virtual character, you’re controlling a real avatar. Read more on Robot telepresence: When my avatar went to work…

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[Image: Psychologist Kieron O’Connor, shown with a computer screen loaded with 3-D images from a hoarder’s stash, is conducting research into virtual reality therapies at the University of Quebec Outaouais in Gatineau.]

Hoarding: The virtual reality of clutter

By Maria Cook September 28, 2010

Psychologist Kieron O’Connor has compiled a list 30 pages long of different objects he has seen hoarders accumulate. The list includes newspapers, empty cornflake packages and toilet paper rolls.

“It’s a very difficult problem to treat,” he says. “People collect things and they can’t get rid of them. They build up at home and often take over so the person has no living space.”

O’Connor, with two colleagues, is studying whether virtual reality could be a possible treatment for hoarding. It is believed to be the first study of its kind in Canada. It takes place at the University of Quebec Outaouais (UQO) in Gatineau. The university is one of the few in North America doing research in cyberpsychology. Read more on Using virtual reality to treat hoarding…

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[Image: A visitor plays a new 3D game on Sony Corp's PlayStation 3 motion-sensitive controller "Move" at Tokyo Game Show in Chiba, east of Tokyo Sept. 16, 2010. (Yuriko Nakao/Reuters)]

Tokyo Game Show: Gamers go all out

In Japan, it’s surreal reality meets virtual reality.

By Jason Overdorf
September 27, 2010

TOKYO, Japan — High atop a 30-foot tower built to showcase Microsoft’s new Xbox360 Kinect, Japanese models kitted out in short-shorts, pigtails and sneakers scrambled to kick their virtual selves into high gear before a giant, cinema-sized screen.

As they jumped and ducked, and their on-screen icons — the popular skateboarders from Sega’s new Sonic Free Riders game — raced and soared through the technicolor virtual landscape, it was hard to draw the line between the real and the surreal.

And all around the colossal tower, a horde of headsetted gamers shuffled to the hypnotic screens of blockbuster “franchises” like Halo, Assassin’s Creed, Final Fantasy and Medal of Honor.

Welcome to the Tokyo Game Show, otherwise known as “TGS.”

While you weren’t paying attention, the global videogame industry has surpassed the movie business and the music business to become the highest-grossing entertainment industry in the world — bringing in about $20 billion a year.

That’s right. The premier of a top title like Halo: Reach, the latest in a series of futuristic war games developed by a company called Bungie, is as big an event as the opening of a new flick from James Cameron or Steven Spielberg — both of whom have put their names behind top-flight game titles.

Tripling the opening weekend gross of Inception, Halo: Reach alone did $200 million in business on the first day of sales, which coincided with TGS, held Sept. 16-19 in Tokyo’s Makuhari Messe.

And gaming console technologies like Microsoft Kinect’s motion-sensitive game play (which makes Nintendo’s Wii look like Pong) and Nintendo’s glasses-free 3DS are actually pushing the cutting edge of computing.

But what’s on display at TGS is not so much the technological advances in gaming — where the West has actually outstripped Japan in recent years, with biggies like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty coming out of Scotland and California.

What’s on display here is the leading edge of virtual culture, where games go mainstream, and your average “salary man” blurs the lines between the everyday and the pixelated world. Read more on Tokyo Game Show: Real reality meets virtual reality…

[From the web site of

SEPT. 27, 2010

5 questions: Gaba on the LKSC’s simulation-based learning

As associate dean for immersive and simulation-based learning, David Gaba, MD, has played a major role in the development of the Hon Mai and Joseph Goodman Center for Simulation and Immersive Learning — a virtual hospital floor on the ground level of the Li Ka Shing Center for Learning and Knowledge and one of the world’s largest medical simulation facilities. An internationally-renowned expert in this type of experiential, hands-on learning, Gaba, professor of anesthesiology, recently discussed the history of the field and how it would be practiced in the LKSC with communications office executive director Paul Costello. A podcast of their conversation, part of the medical school’s “1:2:1” program, is available at http://med.stanford.edu/121/. Here’s an excerpt adapted from that interview. Read more on 5 Questions about Stanford University’s Center for Simulation and Immersive Learning…

Read more on 5 Questions about Stanford University’s Center for Simulation and Immersive Learning…

[From The UK’s

[Image: Crazy horses: Eadweard Muybridge's studies of motion looked comically wrong to his peers]

Tom Sutcliffe: Are we still backing the wrong horse?

The week in culture

Friday, 17 September 2010

There’s a venerable story about the painter Constable which is often cited by writers who want us to recognise that he was a modern pioneer, rather than an exemplar of chocolate-box traditionalism. He was having an argument with a friend about conventions of representation in landscape painting. The friend was trying to persuade him to paint grass as Poussin did, in the honeyed tones of an antique violin. To refute him, it’s said, Constable took a violin and laid it on the lawn, inviting him to make a direct comparison between the two. Painted grass should be the same colour as real grass, was his point.

I’ve always wondered, reading this story, whether the friend caved in immediately or whether he replied that painted grass isn’t actually grass at all – and thus can be pretty much any colour the artist wants to make it. But I don’t think you’re meant to think that. It’s really a story about clarity of perception triumphing over hidebound convention.

I encountered a variation on it the other day while walking round Tate Britain’s exhibition of the work of Eadweard Muybridge, the Victorian photographer and pioneer – I guess – of stop-motion photography. In a newspaper article about his studies of motion, Muybridge once claimed that the painter Frederic Leighton had confessed that he burst out laughing when he first saw the photographs of horses galloping. He knew what a running horse should look like – from countless equestrian paintings – and alongside that preconception these photographs appeared comically wrong. Then, according to Muybridge, Leighton looked a little closer and realised that he would have to adjust his notion of verisimilitude. Like the Constable anecdote, it’s a story that has clear-sighted truth triumphing over inherited tradition. It goes with the grain of a scientific notion of progress in which error cedes to discovered truth.

What it really points up, though, is how malleable and culturally directed our notion of the lifelike is. Read more on Our malleable and culturally directed notion of what is lifelike…