Telepresence

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.