Playpen

I twittered about this the other day and I know it’s been doing the rounds of the interweb, but wanted to post about it properly.

The film has nothing to do with interactivity in the sense that I normally write about it here, but has everything to do with interacting with people. It’s a project by Crush & Lovely and Deltree called Fifty People, One Question.

When I first watched this, the attacks in Mumbai has just happened and I was in a terribly mood thinking about how awful people can be to each other. Then I watched this video and remembered just how wonderful people can be too. It made my day. I just watched it again, and it’s made it again.

(It’s also a great example of indy filmmaking, 80 hours of editing and depth-of-field use with a HV20 video camera. More on the set-up and process over at Deltree’s blog).

Interaction with robots is the out-there end of interaction design’s spectrum. Far beyond just designing an interface on a screen, you need to design a whole set of facial expressions. That is, if you are trying your robot to look human.

The video above (sorry about the Reuters ad in front) shows just how difficult – and perhaps pointless – that approach is.

The project is led by Peter Jaeckel from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory in an attempt to directly tackle Masahiro Mori’s theory of the Uncanny Valley. The Uncanny Valley theory states that the more humanlike the appearance of a robot, the more we empathise with it, up to a point. But the closer it comes to being humanlike, the more we notice the imperfections that end up making it repellent again.

Apple’s touches to OS X, such as the way the log-in box shakes, like someone shaking their head, when you enter the wrong password, or the way the Macbook and iMac power lights ‘breathe’ when in sleep mode, are examples of how those human touches can create a sense of empathy. But I can’t help feeling the body movements are more important than the face sometimes and that the better way to go is more cartoonish and exaggerated, such as Domo from Rodney Brook’s Robotics Lab at MIT.

Jules, the robot from the Bristol lab, was created by Hanson Robotics and there are several clips of him (I want to write ‘it’, but that feels wrong somehow - there must be some empathy there) on YouTube, including quite a unsettling one where he ponders sexuality.

Jaeckel is trying to teach Jules to mimic human expressions better, but to me it still looks like Jules is either a serial killer, desperately needs to take a shit, or both. Either way, the empathy from my side is lacking. It doesn’t help that the electronic guts at back of his head are hanging out.

Yet Domo’s big bug eyes already have me thinking he’s cute and the tender way he handles objects makes him seem much more real, or at least much more empathy inducing. (Or maybe it’s just the old the comedy banana-as-telephone routine).

When he arrived at MIT, Brooks shook up the field of AI by showing that simple rules embodied in a robot that could learn, felt apparently much more intelligent that a computer programmed to think through every logical step. I’m with him and Lakoff and Johnson on this one; you can’t understand the world as if the mind is a separate entity. Cognition is about the embodied experience and interaction designers need to remember that, even if it is just typing and mouse movements.

What seems to be going on with this concentration on the robot face is once again focussing on the head as the centre of experience. But anyone who has drawn a stickman fight knows it’s the body that counts.

I just noticed a whole series of word-association and other games going on in the comments of Fail Blog posts. I have no idea if this is a new phenomenon, but I haven’t seen it before. Nor is it clear if any of these people know each other from elsewhere, but there is a whole little community gameplay scene that appears to spontaneously twist and turn.

I always find it fascinating how people will bend almost any activity towards play and communication. Blog comments are of course already set up for communication, but it’s the ability to have them nested on Fail Blog that seems to create a the boundaries for the playfulness.

Is this something new or have I just been in a cave or something? Anyone know of other examples of this happening?

Google have just launched an additional service called SearchWiki for those with a Google account. Basically you get to add notes to search results or move around search rankings. Google will remember them when you search again and you are logged into your account. That is, you won’t see them if you’re not logged in and your changes make no difference to what others see, unless they ask to see what notes other people have made.

It’s an interesting development for search because it will not only mean you can use notes to remember things for later, but also improve Google’s ranking and searching ability. I feel sure that the notes or amount of notes or something similar will eventually feed into Google’s own algorithms. So, not only will people be complaining that Google is making us dumber, but also that we’re making Google smarter.

You can also have a look at how SearchWiki works.

If you haven’t already heard from me about it, I launched The Designer’s Review of Books at the end of last week. I’ve been so busy reviewing and promoting it, I forgot to promote it on my own blog. Duh.

It seems like it has struck somewhat of a chord, which I’m really pleased about. There seems to have been no single place for reviews of design books up until now, only design sites (albeit great ones like Design Observer) that also had some book reviews.

I hope to do at least weekly reviews, if not a little more frequently. There are also a few well-known designers who will be writing reviews of some of their favourites. I hope, also, to review a few disappointments too – it’s easy to just talk about the great stuff, but people need to know what doesn’t come up to scratch too.

Do go and take a look, subscribe, tweet it and tell your friends. And if you’re thinking of buying any design books from Amazon, you can help me keep the site going through the Designer’s Review of Books Amazon Stores.

It’s the gloves again.

Part of me wants to believe G-Speak is really is a fantastic “spatial operating environment”. The mouse and keyboard are awkward, clunky and out-dated with plenty of problems and it’s time for a change. G-Speak is about freeing ourselves from those shackles, about working in space across multiple screens.

I wanted to scream when I saw the tired reference to Minority Report, but it turns out that one of the team, John Underkoffler, was the science advisor on Minority Report, so they can get away with it given they he ripped off his own ideas for the film.

The video and some of the interaction looks great.

Except for the gloves.

It’s the gloves (and the headset) that made VR so lame. That and being tethered to a machine, so at least that part is no more.

Yet regardless of how much of a paradigm-shifting breakthrough g-speak is, I can’t see people donning the dorky gloves every time they want to work. I can’t see many people devoting that much space to one person’s screens either and I can’t see many people having the stamina to stand with their arms out-streched and wave them about all day. A two-hour yoga class is hard enough.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have a go and experience it for myself. I’m sure there is a whole of interesting interaction going on there.

I really want to be wrong about this. I really want to know that it’s not just a technical triumph from a group of talented tech guys whose blog has the most heinous URLs. I really do.

I just don’t want to have to smell the gloves.

(Via Bren).

If anyone knows what this is all about, please leave a comment and let me know. In the meantime, enjoy the surreal interface.

[UPDATE: Apparently it's the design portfolio of dutch flash designer Coen Grift - nothing like the 'coffee' in Holland to inspire some weirdness. The Dutch inspired us to make Antirom because of this.]