[Presence scholars should lead the way in making sure everyone involved considers and addresses the challenges created by evolving technologies, as highlighted in this column from Futurism. –Matthew]

[Image: “Reality is An Illusion” by Louis Dyer via Deviant Art]

Will AI Blur the Lines Between Physical and Virtual Reality?

By Jay Iorio, Innovation Director for the IEEE Standards Association
August 15, 2017

The Notion of Reality

As technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), big data, 5G, and the internet of things (IoT) advance over the next generation, they will reinforce and spur one another. One plausible scenario is a physical world so enhanced by personalized, AI-curated digital content (experienced with what we today call augmented reality) that the very notion of reality is called into question.

Immersion can change how we interact with content in fundamental ways. For example, a fully immersive AR environment of the future, achieved with a wide-field-of-view headset and full of live content integrated with the built environment, would be intended by design to create in the user an illusion that everything being sensed was “real.” The evolution toward this kind of environment raises a host of ethical questions, specifically with attention to the AI that would underlie such an intelligent and compelling illusion.

When watching a movie, the viewer is physically separated from the illusion. The screen is framed, explicitly distinct from the viewer. The frame is a part of traditional art forms; from the book to the painting to the skyscraper, each is explicitly separated from the audience. It is bounded and physically defined.

But with digital eyewear, things change. Digital eyewear moves the distance of digital mediation from the screen (approximately 20 feet) to the human face, which is at zero distance, and almost eliminates the frame. It starts raising inevitable questions about what constitutes “reality” when much of one’s sensory input is superimposed on the physical world by AI. At that stage of the technology’s evolution, one could still simply opt out by removing the eyewear. Although almost indistinguishable from the physical world, that near-future world would still be clinging precariously to the human face.

The next step would be moving the source of the digital illusion into the human body – a distance of less than zero – through contact lenses, implants, and ultimately direct communication. At that point, the frame is long gone. The digital source commandeers the senses, and it becomes very hard to argue that the digital content isn’t as “real” as a building on the corner – which, frankly, could be an illusion itself in such an environment. Enthusiasts will probably argue that our perception is already an electrochemical illusion, and implants merely enhance our natural selves. In any case, opting out would become impractical at best. This is the stage of the technology that will raise practical questions we have never had to address before. Read more on Ethical, practical challenges of VR-AR-AI-IoT blurring the lines between physical and virtual reality…

[This post from the MIT Media Lab website (it also appears in Medium and IEEE Spectrum) is a first-person report on a program of research that examines children’s social (medium-as-social-actor presence) responses to robots; I think it’s a model for how to introduce a wider audience to these ideas (e.g., I plan to assign and discuss it in undergraduate courses). The original version includes several more pictures and a video. –Matthew]

[Image: A child listens to DragonBot tell a story during one of our research studies. Credit: Personal Robots Group]

Making new (robot) friends

Understanding children’s relationships with social robots

by Jacqueline M. Kory Westlund

Hi, my name is Mox!

This story begins in 2013, in a preschool in Boston, where I hide, with laptop, headphones, and microphone, in a little kitchenette. Ethernet cables trail across the hall to the classroom, where 17 children eagerly await their turn to talk to a small fluffy robot.

“Hi, my name is Mox! I’m very happy to meet you.”

The pitch of my voice is shifted up and sent over the somewhat laggy network. My words, played by the speakers of Mox the robot and picked up by its microphone, echo back with a two-second delay into my headphones. It’s tricky to speak at the right pace, ignoring my own voice bouncing back, but I get into the swing of it pretty quickly.

We’re running show-and-tell at the preschool on this day. It’s one of our pilot tests before we embark on an upcoming experimental study. The children take turns telling the robot about their favorite animals. The robot (with my voice) replies with an interesting fact about each animal, Did you know that capybaras are the largest rodents on the planet?” (Yes, one five-year-old’s favorite animal is a capybara.) Later, we share how the robot is made and talk about motors, batteries, and 3D printers. We show them the teleoperation interface for remote-controlling the robot. All the kids try their hand at triggering the robot’s facial expressions.

Then one kid asks if he can teach the robot how to make a paper airplane.

We’d just told them all how the robot was controlled by a human. I ask: Does he want to teach me how to make a paper airplane?

No, the robot, he says.

Somehow, there was a disconnect between what he had just learned about the robot and the robot’s human operator, and the character that he perceived the robot to be.

Relationships with robots?

In the years since that playtest, I’ve watched several hundred children interact with both teleoperated and autonomous robots. The children talk with the robots. They laugh. They give hugs, drawings, and paper airplanes. One child even invited the robot to his preschool’s end-of-year picnic.

Mostly, though, I’ve seen kids treat the robots as social beings. But not quite like how they treat people. And not quite like how they treat pets, plants, or computers.

These interactions were clues: There’s something interesting going on here. Children ascribed physical attributes to robots—they can move, they can see, they can feel tickles—but also mental attributes: thinking, feeling sad, wanting companionship. A robot could break, yes, and it is made by a person, yes, but it can be interested in things. It can like stories; it can be nice. Maybe, as one child suggested, if it were sad, it would feel better if we gave it ice cream.

Although our research robots aren’t commercially available, investigating how children understand robots isn’t merely an academic exercise. Many smart technologies are joining us in our homes: Roomba, Jibo, Alexa, Google Home, Kuri, Zenbo…the list goes on. Robots and AI are here, in our everyday lives.

We ought to ask ourselves, what kinds of relationships do we want to have with them? Because, as we saw with the children in our studies, we will form relationships with them. Read more on Understanding children’s relationships with social robots…

[This post from Google’s blog reports on interesting results and lessons learned from an experiment in presence. The original includes more images; for more information see coverage in Daily Coffee News. –Matthew]

Daydream Labs: Teaching Skills in VR

Ian MacGillivray, Software Engineer
July 20, 2017

You can read every recipe, but to really learn how to cook, you need time in the kitchen. Wouldn’t it be great if you could slip on a VR headset and have a famous chef walk you through the basics step by step? In the future, you might be able to learn how to cook a delicious five-course meal—all in VR. In fact, virtual reality could help people learn all kinds of skills.

At Daydream Labs, we tried to better understand how interactive learning might work in VR. So we set up an experiment, which aimed at teaching coffee making. We built a training prototype featuring a 3D model of an espresso machine which reacts like a real one would when you press the buttons, turn the knobs or drop the milk. We also added a detailed tutorial. Then, we tasked one group of people to learn how to pull espresso shots by doing it in VR. (At the end, we gave people a detailed report on how they’d done, including an analysis of the quality of their coffee.) For the purpose of comparison, another group learned by watching YouTube videos. Both groups were able to train for as long as they liked before trying to make a coffee in the real world; people assigned to watch the YouTube tutorial normally did so three times, and people who took the VR training normally went through it twice.

We were excited to find out that people learned faster and better in VR. Both the number of mistakes made and the time to complete an espresso were significantly lower for those trained in VR (although, in fairness, our tasting panel wasn’t terribly impressed with the espressos made by either group!) It’s impossible to tell from one experiment, of course, but these early results are promising. We also learned a lot of about how to design future experiments. Here’s a glimpse at some of those insights. Read more on Google’s presence experiment: VR vs. video to train people to make espresso…

[This story from 4K describes options for experiencing next week’s total solar eclipse via technology. The CNN press release notes that “While only a fraction of the country will be able to witness the total eclipse in-person, CNN’s immersive livestream will enable viewers nationwide to ‘go there’ virtually and experience a moment in history, seven times over.” For more information about all aspects of the eclipse see coverage on the NASA website. –Matthew]

Where to Watch The 2017 Total Solar Eclipse In Full 4K And Virtual Reality

by Stephen on August 14, 2017

Although not even the best 4K OLED or QLED TVs on the market will beat experiencing a Total Solar Eclipse live and in-person with your own eyes (while using special-purpose solar filters, such as “eclipse glasses” or hand-held solar viewers), for those who can’t get a true naked-eye view of the upcoming fantastic astronomical event, there’s CNN. In partnership with Volvo, CNN will be broadcasting 2017’s Total Solar Eclipse of North America on August 21, and you’ll be able to watch it on your 4K resolution TV/Monitor or in immersive 360-degree virtual reality using a VR head-set.

The broadcast will be available all around the world in 4K resolution at CNN.com/eclipse, or in 4K and other available resolutions and formats through CNN’s mobile apps, Samsung Gear VR powered by Oculus via Samsung VR, Oculus Rift via Oculus Video and through CNN’s Facebook page via Facebook Live 360.

According to CNN, the livestream will be enhanced by real-time graphics, close-up views of the sun, and the running commentary of experts from the science community. Four cameras will be spaced across the United States in four different locations: Snake River Valley, Idaho; Beatrice, Nebraska; Blackwell, Missouri; and Charleston, South Carolina. Each camera will be shooting 4K video shot of the total eclipse’s path.

Other sites like NASA, The Weather Channel, National Geographic and Astronomy.com will be also broadcasting the natural event through their main websites and Facebook pages, presumably in 4K as well at least for NASA, which has a regular habit of shooting astronomical events in ultra HD for public consumption. Read more on “Be there” for the August 21 total solar eclipse via 4K and VR…