Telepresence

Jigsaw Falling Into Place

Doing Something Sketchy? It’s Harder to Cover Up Now
Includes quotes from our classmates Ameya Mhatre and Daniel Liss

This whole telepresence thing might have made the world become really small, easy-to-learn and very close to each others. I’ve always been thinking this type of situation very negatively. Especially in my culture, now it is really easy to hurt people without using any weapons. Government even makes some kind of poster warning people “Your words might kill someone”. And even most websites including the biggest portal/blog website in Korea made people have to give their real name when they want to comment on something and even though there are comments they hide those comments so that people have to click on button to view those comments. The funny thing is there used to be lots of comments but not any more. It happens after some celebrities committed suicides because of the depression which their families claim that their children have had it because of those Evil comments on the internet about them. Well..maybe that could be the case and it’s not just the case of the celebrities.

Personally, I don’t believe telepresence can create a big beige global culture. I would say GIANT GRAY culture. The ‘globalization’ means to me is that people know about other culture and accept them as they are, not try to change them and judge them. The great case of letting the world know about their society is the one(Flash mobs) that Clay Shirky mentioned. These are the something that people can do and the government can’t. But once people started judging other culture based on the way of their living, then there won’t be the world containing the millions of unique culture. Again there will be the only big gray living environment.

What I thought as my project was the display of color of the map how similar to America is. Whenever the little country becomes very similar to the major one (maybe that would mean “similar to American culture”), the color becomes gray. It might be based on food, clothes, marriage…etc. There will be needed lots of statistics, but I think it would be very interesting to see how similar to each other we are.

jain

I have been reading “The Great Good Place” for a while, and I like thinking along reading the book, since I found myself in my happy own world of drinks and bars and waitresses since I come to NYC. However I am not that much pessimistic about the situation in America as Ray Oldenburg is (though the reason might be that I only know NYC may god bless the city).

I believe one of the most important things that make a bar/cafe a third place is the host/owner/waiter/bartender (I will call them ‘host’ for the rest of the text). Besides being embedded to our first impressions on the place, their welcoming attitude, friendliness define the place a lot. In the book there are a lot of emphasize on the regulars of the place, and I think the ethnicity, age, and related demographics of the regulars are also defined by the hosts; this might result the regulars being over 35 married-with-children baseball followers, or being very diverse as of age, gender, etc.. I don’t agree that such places would always be levelers and the rules of homophily in social networks would still be valid.

The reason I would emphasize the importance of the host is that, regulars who would define the general mood of the space are always welcomed by the host in their first visit to their place. A new visitor finds the host as the only (and hence the first) person to initiate a conversation, since a path of communication already exists as ‘ordering’.  The mood of this communication between the host and the visitor highly defines if the visitor would become a regular, and also the attitude and mood of the person after becoming a regular. Hosts may also provide a good communication path between the customers, in doing a soft introduction among regulars and new visitors.

As it is mentioned in the book, I believe the ‘home other than home’ aspect is quite in place. One thing that really impressed me was the time when I was confident enough to know that the host(s) would take care of me if I got blacked out or similar would happen.

Going back to Telepresence, that would have been interesting to think of a project that would provide a connection between home and the third place of a regular. In many American TV shows (mostly comedy; friends, how I met your mother, seinfeld, etc..) in which the third place are also the places not so different from home, we can see that such setting wouldn’t create much difference in the events that would happen; third places are proven to be as homey places as the homes of the characters. So it makes me think of something that could immerse these two places; blinking leds at home for each glass of my favorite that is consumed at my bar, free ordering of a whiskey at the bar when my credit card bills are dropped into my mailbox. interesting…

Way before I enrolled in this class, I was thinking about how we will work in the future.  It seems like there is an increased tendency to either work from home, or at least show up to a formal work place only part of the time.    On the flip side of this,  the sort of creative individuals who may be working independently or with a few other people seem to want a sort of workspace that can allow for collaboration.  I am pretty sure that places already exist where  people who are not affiliated with companies or firms can show up to a sort of collective workspace– an open office so to speak- where they can work in a shared environment with people who are not necessarily related to them in any way other than as fellow desk-space renters.   So, I was thinking about the tension that seems to be already underway for people who don’t have the conventional 9-5 office job– the more that people have more flexible kinds of jobs, the more that they tend to have individual studio or office space, (including their homes).  simultaneously, there seems to be a kind of desire to be in an environment that allows for interaction with those same kinds of creative or insightful types.  How, for example could I have an environment like ITP after I graduate?  I may not necessarily want to work for the same boss as my fellow alumni, but it would be wonderful if they were on the same floor as me– maybe even working a couple of tables away.  My wild Third Space proposal at the time was a sort of virtual office– a workspace that you enter where you could see and interact with people who are in remote locations.  It would be awesome if physically, the workspaces were the same, and the room was populated by both real people and projected images of people who are in the same workspace far away.  At this point I’d settle for one wall of my room opening into the wall of my friend’s workspace in, say England.   I guess tat in terms of an ITP project, such imaginings are pretty far off, but I do think that the exciting thing about the idea of third place is that it could be an immersive environment that allows for a more diverse range of interactions and communications with people.  Some might say that Second Life is a good example of Third Space, but sometimes I wonder about how much the environment diminishes the interaction.  Having an avatar in second life, or a chat identity online , becomes in some ways about performing that identity– the few times that I have been in second life, I feel like I am interacting with an avatar, more than I feel like  I am having a meaningful experience with the real-life person controlling it.  It’s heard to explain but there is slippage there.  For me, the HP  telepresence center  offered is a more authentic sharing of space that the more literal Third Spaces I’ve experienced.   This all probably just gets back into the subtlety of human expressions and Jaron Lanier’s insights into why virtual reality and tele-immersion remain more hype than hyperreality: they can’t at this point capture the nuance of body language.

LonelyBooth

The problem with chat rooms is that you have to chat. Maybe I want to exist in a technologically mediated Third Space where my presence isn’t limited to synecdoche, and where my range of actions isn’t prescribed by the interface.   Maybe I just  want to sit in the presence of someone who is not really there because I have hundreds of pages of reading to do and I don’t want to do it alone.  I would like to create a booth that has a desk and a comfortable chair.  It will be cozy but not claustrophobic.  Like a phone booth, I can slide open the door and use the space as I wish. The table in front of me intersects one of the walls.  Vito Acconci style, this wall is   a screen that projects the presence of someone who may be in another booth far away.  They can see me from a camera in my booth in the same way that I can see them.  I don’t think the project will include sound, it would simply create an opportunity for people to sit with one another as strangers (or possibly acquaintances) in a different context than we are normally used to.  I would be particularly interested in the way that this interaction would play with our social awareness of looking at and interacting with unfamiliar people.  Through the boot, they would have and opportunity to redefine the normal interaction scheme.

Kacie

Spitzer knows all about Third Place. For him the Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC was his third place.

To me, Third Place is really just venue. Your place or mine? Neither, lets find somewhere neutral. We discussed this briefly when we covered trust earlier in the semester. I brought up the idea that the HP Halo group needs to create a comfortable and secure environment for its clients. They are acting as the intermediary between two parties. Just as the Mayfair Hotel offered Spitzer a secure, trustworthy third place, HP does the same for its clients.

Thus the main function and ultimate success of any third place will be based on trust. Users of third places will want to understand the rules and hold the venue liable for any disparities. The best third place is one with integrity, consistency and accountability. The worst third place is biased and malleable.

More thoughts to follow.

Meeting in neutral territory can facilitate better communication. In “The Good Great Place” Oldham talks about the benefits of bars and cafes where you are free of expectations and long term entanglements of work and home. Virtual worlds such as Second Life attempt to provide such a third place but they lack a feeling of presence. Speaking on the phone, I feel like I am occupying a third space, not my surroundings and not trying to envision the other side, more located in the middle distance where you are looking at something but not focused it. Perhaps phones work so well because the shared mind space is not weighed down by being visualized but there are advantages to seeing the other person’s face. I felt like the blandness of the HP background in the HP setup deemphasized context to have people floating in an abstract space. The curved in the table continuing between locations united it into a single non existent space.

I would like to create a hybrid space with video like the HP set up and synthetic coordinate system like virtual worlds. I hope to get the richness of expression and feeling of presence from video conferencing but the freedom from distraction of portraying real visual context.

I want to build a device for video conferencing into a hat. I want to use the camera from a cell phone built into a hat as we saw in the Greenday video to capture your face. The other people will be displayed on the screen of the cell phone but you will have to to move your neck (see Lanier) to look from one person to the next in the conference. I want your head as displayed to other people to actually appear turned towards the person your are looking at (the thing HP could not do). To do this I will have to get compass readings from the hat, together with the image from the camera to be sent to a server and distributed to other participants.

It’s obvious that to get rid of boundary of all over the world is really difficult, even if we can always meet physically and talk each other directly. I think our words don’t have so much power and make us confusing sometimes. There are complicated backgrounds like race, religion, pride and so on. It’s almost impossible to understand each other completely; therefore we need to know at least one matter. People need to share some feeling or incidents rather than discuss. For instance, I usually feel that I can break boundary of people whom I don’t know, when I enjoy music in festival. People put our hands together and share precious time. It helps us to understand each other as a first step.

My proposal for globalization is telehands which people hold hands together. People put hands in front of the camera and share the time for a while. This behavior looks like shake hands. Sometimes, they introduce their own national songs each other and put their hands together. There is no word between us, people pretend like body language. Otherwise, it can be like music ceremony. People hand in hand together all over the world at the same time by using camera. It’s like a huge festival at the same time all over the world. I believe that we need to walk toward each other at least one step and know a bit thing. This matter makes it possible for us to reduce conflict.

There are many idioms related to hands and a lot of them show positive relationship between people. I couldn’t mention exact idea by using hands but it might contain something. I guess it helps us to join hands with others.

Noriaki

It strikes me as odd that many of the items in my possession– from my favorite hoodie sweatshirts to my collection of little plastic dime-store toys– have traveled much farther from their point of origin than I ever have in my lifetime… My t-shirt was made in Cambodia, my plastic monster figurine was fabricated in China, as were my sneakers. These objects integrate immediately and seamlessly into my life, carrying no evidence of the locales where they were fabricated or the people who made them. In the past, when the means of transport were limited, people’s lives were filled with things made nearby, purchased nearby, most likely by and from makers and sellers known to them.

Objects that came from far away seemed strange and mysterious– I’m thinking of grade school field trips I took to the Peabody Essex Museum north of Boston, which houses a collection of goods brought via the whale-fishery to rough-hewn, Puritan-plain New England. Carved ivory boxes, ornately decorated china, tiny, delicate jade figurines… These objects asserted a striking presence in their new home. My Chinese sneakers, on the other hand, are pseudo-retro 80’s North Americana, referencing high school skate-punk culture. Does skateboard subculture flourish in China? Does this object bear any message from halfway around the world? The objects that come to us from far-flung places now are often shallow mirrors for our own culture.

In response, I propose TeleSweatShop, a live HD video-feed wall to replace the mirror in your local Old Navy, Gap, or (my favorite) Forever 21. The screen would serve as a two-way window into the factory floor or employee break room or entrance to the production facility churning out those colorful cheap t-shirts and cute sneakers, reconnecting producer with consumer, and (if only briefly) shattering our all-too-entrancing North American looking glass.

-zannah

The term Globalization has transform its definition during the last years to become a rag bag where everyone puts different explanations for the current situation of the world. The basic problem is that most of this definitions and analysis come from the developed countries. A good example of this is the book “The world is flat” of Thomas L. Friedman. I think that history is strictly bounded to the economic trends and thus there is no way of explaining the world without taking into account the economic differences among countries. The world is much less flat than we think and even if we can find the traces of some transnational corporations in several countries, the monetary differences prevent this process to get deeper in the structure of the society. The processes of exchange and interculturality are of course accelerated by the development of technology but the majority of the world population is still excluded of this global world.

In my opinion the best way to use the network in reference to globalization is to keep working on its informational aspect. Internet has evolved, and now it can be used as a multifunctional platform, to publish a blog or broadcast video and sound. We already have experienced this “journalistic” aspect of it. I would be interested in looking for ways to spread this information in an accessible way for those countries which don’t have access to the Internet. It could be a radio broadcast, letters or newspapers. It’s time to come back to traditional means using at the same time the advantages of the technology.

Rodrigo

My opinions on globalization stem from my opinions on environmental issues. I feel that things are in the state they are today because of the availability of cheap fuel. The world seems as small as it is because we can quickly and cheaply visit people on the other side of the world. Businesses have set up camp in far off places to save on cost, they’ve outsourced jobs, and they’ve redirected manufacturing all because getting things from here to there isn’t as difficult as it may have once been, before fuel has become so cheap and ubiquitous. I feel that we are all in for a change in the coming years that will drastically alter our view of the world as being “not so big after all”. I think once the world becomes bigger again forms of telepresence will most definitely fall into the spotlight simply because it’s cheaper, and innovation of this technology will grow knowing that the demand will be so high.

This isn’t exactly a complete project proposal but I definitely think it would be interesting to use this perception of the size of the world and its relation to fuel cost as a way of altering or distorting our view of things. For example, as fuel costs rise the scale or distance from New York to London will seem to increase. Our perception of a couple hours of travel will no longer seem like a simple car ride, train ride, or plane trip. Especially if its the same time that it takes to travel from New York to Philadelphia and it costs a fortune. Another project example could be a funny one. Your portraits of family members abroad could change physical scale as the distance between you and them SEEMS to get larger (as the world grows).

Somewhere near the beginning of the Iraq war, I remember thinking that all I really wanted was to have a random sampling of Iraqis stand in front of a camera and say whether they wanted us there or not. I didn’t want reporter to be holding the mike, I just wanted some place outside of media where I could hear what the average person in Iraq felt about the US “helping out.” As a starting point for this week’s topic, I’ve been thinking about some of Meng’s comments. Her observation– that more interaction can bring more conflict– is true. However, isolation and ignorance are probably much worse. Ignoring the huge questions about the economics and financial ethics of globalization, I would like to propose that in the realm of culture, the combination of globalization and telepresence may be one of the most important ways of bringing people to mutual understanding (or at least provide a platform for overcoming absolute ignorance). Nothing typifies the ability to connect people across the world like the HP Telepresence Center does. On another level though, web-cams and cell phones may be the trustworthy extensions of ourselves into unfamiliar territory: if I can’t actually visit a place and see for myself, simple devices such as web-cams can be my eyes and ears. I don’t want to see a movie or an edited reality– I think in order for me to have a feeling that I’ve just seen a slice of life from, for example Baghdad, I would need to see and hear the world from a more or less objective lens: a camera that is on 24/7, conveying it’s data directly to the internet. Low-tech or ad-hoc use of cameras in this case somehow creates a feeling of authenticity and transparency. Sousveillance. I guess the biggest impediment is always interpretation: both in a literal and figurative sense. How can I understand what I see taking place through the small view of a camera and interpret it correctly without knowing the bigger picture: the cultural context. Also, how can I understand what is being said without a computer or person translating for me?

Proposal will be posted shortly.

Kacie

So if the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention is somewhat true, is it simply the established economic ties between countries that prevent wars? How about the shared experience of eating the same food? Listening to the same music, watching the same movies, speaking the same language, wearing the same clothes? Could a globalized culture make a more peaceful world?

Same Food Same Poison is a website for global cultural homogenization. All aspects of culture are defined with one solution through a democratic process. The best movie ever? There is only one. The most fashionable hat? Only one. A single global culture is defined and promoted through a democratic voting process to continuously define culture of the time. Visitors of the site are rewarded with McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and other culture pushing coupons for assimilating to and identifying current cultural trends in the voting process.

During my life, I had to move several times. First from my parents house to my dorm, then from the dorm to an apartment close to the college, then I moved to Milan, then back to Salamanca… The last time I moved was to weeks ago, from Brooklyn to Manhattan. I had important personal experiences in all these places and I use to think of them when I feel nostalgic.

Last week I had to come back to my old room to repaint the wall. I was there alone, with nothing to do, waiting for the wall to get dry in order to put on a second coat of paint. Suddenly I started remembering when I just came to New York and moved in. It was the particular noise of the street what recalled these memories. The alarm of the car, the loud music… I had got used to it and I didn’t hear it anymore… till now.

Everyplace has specific associated sounds. You can use it to recall these places and the activities around, what happens on the street, the habits of your neighbors… If I had installed a microphone connected to a network in everyplace I lived, I could now trace the sound, the noise and recall my experiences there…I should have done that, but now it’s to late…or perhaps not?

Rodrigo

how can telepresence prevent wars? network the dinner tables of perpetually (or potentially) warring nations.

real-time video feeds of families as they sit down to eat - as a cross-broadcast - say from ramallah to jerusalem and vice versa.

maybe it’s harder to launch katyusha missiles or deadly raids on your enemies after you’ve watched them carefully shovel mashed peas into the mouths of cooing babies.

What separates the current manifestations of telepresence from all those which have previously allowed for the observation of distant people and places and their potential ability to prevent violence?  An example of these alternative mediums include travel journals, biographies, documentary films, and short wave radio.  All of the previously listed modes of documentation and communication have offered the global community with the means to further develop an understanding of foreign people and environments.  These mediums were not successful in preventing violence based on cultural and nationalistic differences.  Tragically we continue to observe patterns of violence within our global population despite any advantage our current population might possess.  I do not believe modern achievements in the field of telepresence alone have the ability to prevent global conflict.

It is evident that current technological expressions in the field of telepresence have defined a new richness in regards to the way one is able to interact with foreign environments.  In my opinion, the speed at which data can be published within an online medium presents the most potential in regards to aiding in the prevention of global conflict.

During the 2003 invasion of Iraq I closely followed the blog of an young Iraqi student.  I was deeply touched as he described his wait for the return of the B-52 bombers that were en-route from an Italian re-fueling station.  He spoke of the state of his neighborhood; who had survived, who had been killed, where food was available, where water was available, and even asked his readers to suggest the best methods to save the remaining charge left on his laptop battery.  Resources such as this transcend the biased views of mainstream media and expose the inherent human qualities present in us all.  I found a sense of connection in the vulnerability broadcast by the author.  I did not question this blog, and truly believed that I was in-fact following the thoughts of a fellow human-being.

Telepresence as it has always existed depends upon the readiness of any associated users to inherently ignore the limitations of the medium while embracing any potential for human connection.

As long as there are human beings, there will be conflicts. With the globalization, the conflicts will increase because of more and more interactions between people with different backgrounds, values, and interests. To solve the problems from conflicts without using war, we are required to have a globalized mindset: open minded and could respect and appreciate and critically think about the conflicts.. How much we know about other cultures? how to be more tolerant towards difference?

Teens don’t have very strong and well-shaped background, but they are also not simply a blank piece of paper. So I’d like to create a community for teens to expose them to different cultures and make them participate in. Though teens from all over the world speak different language, drawing is the universal language. So I want to design a community for them to draw. To make it fair, each teen could only draw one continuous stroke, then waiting for teens from other countries to draw. The color representing different courtiers based on IP address will indicate whether it’s your turn.

I’m also thinking to encourage some meaningful interactions. Not just “hey, how old are you?” but a bit deeper at how they regard global issues, such as wars, environment problems, Olympic games, etc. So they are encouraged to draw on top of existing pictures or drawings of those topics.

meng

A few weeks ago in class, DanO mentioned Nurit Bar-Shai and Kleoni Manoussakis’ project Subway Show. Here is the full-length video.

I always wondered what would happen if we dropped mesh networkable cell phones with cameras and communication infrastructure on Iraq instead of bombs.  I wonder if the transparency of enabling a nation of video bloggers would have exposed the weak threat that they in fact posed towards us, the deep internal divisions that we are dealing with now.  Most of all I wonder if it would have showed the ordinary humanity that we would be destroying with our bombs.

When Steve Mann took off his wearable camera to go swim, he felt uncomfortable. When one day in the summer 2007 when I came to my special intern office, as usual, turned on the computer, the first thing, typed “pandora.com” in my browser to listen to the web radio, it was shown that “please support internet radio and prevent it from being banned, so today, we don’t have internet radio all over the country” something like that. Then I even didn’t know how to do my work!! I can’t sit in the office without internet radio, I suddenly realized. Same thing with technology mediated sex. Imagine, one day, people get used to internet porn websites, coz it’s like internet radio, a lot, you can simply switch if you don’t like, you can replay if you like that, no risk, no cost, keep it secret… so many good things. It’s very understandable that certain type of people(long distance, senior people, disabled people, etc.) will not only like it, but may get addict to it. Addiction is interesting. People sometimes feel guilty about their addiction, but still can’t help doing it. Then, there was a project coming to my mind, gallery based, a TV with porn and a seat where people sit on to watch TV, the longer you are sitting on the seat, the blur the porn is. (I’ve searched for a long time, but failed, will add the link later if it’s lucky to hit my face again). It’s hard to imagine what if we stop porn website one day, what will happen?

Another thing is about odor. I read an article, saying a girl always wears a huge tshirt which obviously doesn’t fit her. She even always show off her t-shirt to others, let other smell it. In fact, that’s her boyfriend’s t-shirt with his odor. Same thing with woman’s odor. I’m thinking of ways to make the significant other smell you except sending your t-shirt or underwear to her or him. It would also be interesting to keep and store the odor of your ex boy/girl friend, just as you shoot erotic video to keep the memory.  

One interesting industrial design I came across when I desperately searched for the project I mentioned before:   http://zinoopark.com/  check the project: erotic dish