Telepresence

In both face-to-face and screen-based conversations, we depend on visual perception to guide us in assessing the other person’s authenticity, emotion etc.  While we say that we are “talking” with someone, we are just as much involved in watching them—the things that others “give off” are perhaps more important than the words that pass. Without a doubt, perception of visual cues can help us “sum up” or assess another person—if I am talking to Jim and he is blinking too much, I might conclude that there is something wrong with him—he isn’t telling the truth, perhaps.  Or, he is making a little grimacing microexpression just before he smiles that make me realize his smile is forced. But what if the conclusion I make is wrong?  Our brains are constantly filtering through millions of bits of data gathered by our sense perceptions and filtering them from the subconscious to the conscious.  As soon as they are in our minds, we must do something with them—make an evaluation about Jim blinking too much.  While we may use our minds and our intuition to assess correctly in most cases, the only way we can really and truly know the contents of Jim’s mind at that moment—know why he might be blinking too much—is by asking him.  But we know he might lie.  This is why we trust his body so much—we think it will be more honest.   For my first project for Telepresence, LieChat, I decided to explore trust in conversations by using sensors do the work of perceiving what is “given off” by the body.  Sensors measuring galvanic skin response (GSR) are attached to both of the people, who are sitting in front of their computers in distant places.  The GSR sensors measure the electrical resistance of the skin (sympathetic activity), which is connected to emotional arousal.  While it is not possible to identify the particular emotion that is being read by the GSR, fluctuations from a baseline measurement can be used to augment our perception of what the person we are talking to is “giving off.”    Each person sits in front of a pan-tilt camera that is controlled by his or her galvanic skin response.   The other person sees them on their computer and can have a video Chat just like normal—except they are constantly seeing a graph of the other person’s GSR readings displayed at the bottom of the video.   When, in the course of their chat, the GSR sensor picks up a reading that is above the baseline level (indicating emotional arousal) the camera starts to move around.  The amount it moves is correlated to the difference between the baseline level and the GSR’s current reading of emotional arousal.  Thus, when the person’s GSR goes over the baseline, the person they are talking to sees them, not in focus at the center of the screen, but through the person’s own emotions. While the working name of this project is lieChat, it is really a way of augmenting our perception, and perhaps perspective.  We see the other person clearly when they are at the baseline, and in a jerking, erratic way when their GSR is above this level.  While the task remains for us to make an assessment of what the GSR values mean in relation to what the person is saying (perhaps they are experiencing anger, perhaps they are embarrassed or in love), lieChat seeks to connect what we “give off” with our interior sates—our emotions so that the people we interact with can trust both our words and our bodies.

Kacie

I generally don’t think that trust is something that can be measured or secured through some device, agreement, or any kind of remote or face-to-face interaction. My feeling is you could have as many reasons to not to trust someone you meet up close as someone you meet online. I mean, if they really want to deceive or betray you, they could do it even if they were very close to you.
of course, if it is someone you have never met in person, this would be a different matter. Seeing what they look like would give you a better sense of what they are like, and if the basics of who they claim to be are true. It’s possible that meeting someone online you wouldn’t be sure if they are lying to you about who they are, but hopefully having a more complete image of them will help ease your worries.
That said, I am interested in the thin line between distrust and paranoia. Most of the times it only takes common sense to know whether or not you should trust someone. If you are talking to people you know nothing about, you could build trust slowly, or by getting external information about them. If you are afraid that they are not revealing something, then you could try looking when they do not think they are being observed. An idea would be a platform that connects people to each other only if they are willing to be connected to the other person whenever that person wishes, with no step in which the person “agrees” to accept the connection, then you would hopefully be a little more convinced that the other person doesn’t have something to hide. But that sounds an awful lot like surveillance/spying.
On the flip side of distrust is, obviously, trust, or faith in something. An interesting commentary on the untrustworthiness of the internet as a medium to meet and interact with people would be to use the internet as a source of “trust” so as you are talking to someone, you will get a background check with any online traces of the other person, or who they claim to be. Sure that could just lead to even less trust, but it is faithful to the technology — you have to trust something. It is also somewhat taboo, to openly admit that you are not trusting someone, and are “stalking” them to see if they are telling the truth. if the other person trusted you and found out that you were being so paranoid, would they still trust you?

After reading an excerpt from “The Great Good Place”, I got thinking about how its possible to mend the various problems seen in American suburbs / house developments and the lack of community in these places. My idea for a solution is a simple toolkit that allows residents to throw up a radio broadcast with little to no effort so that they can share themselves, share their opinions, and broadcast to others within their community. The radio broadcast can be an outlet for community radio shows, community news, general dissemination of information, or even a place for community culture, music, humor, and art. The other residents will essentially need no additional equipment as radios are pretty commonplace. No infrastructure would need to be built. All they would need to know is the time and frequency.

The technology would have to be as small as possible, cheap as possible, and easy as possible.

As some of you know, I’m now in the middle of the intensive and disappointing process of “house hunting” which means I have to perform each day, just as “The presentation of the Self” explains.
The search of a new home involves always the expression of my character, the awareness of my needs and the definition of the presence. Like any kind of virtual exchange, this process involves many events concerning (tele)presence of oneself in contact with the (tele)presence of the others. I would like to analyze these from a different point of view, a reversed timeline, through which the start will be the end and with the end we will start.

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Congratulations! You’ve got a “cozy” (or I should say tiny) room in a decent apartment. The rent is affordable and the location is not bad. The roommates…well you don’t know them yet, but they seem easy-going and clean. Quite normal people. You didn’t have many choices though. You have to trust them and trust your first perceptions. This is anyway an unbalanced situation so you just have a mental picture made of the short information you read in the description they posted, and what they told you during the short interview. They have instead a complete profile with facts of your life, the remarkable aspects of your personality and the involuntary expression of both your presence and your telepresence. They can trust you. They should.

During the interview with your potential roommates, you talked about your interests, your hobbies and the time you spend at school. They wanted to confirm some things. They wanted to experience your presence. They wanted to have enough information to be able to trust you. They didn’t ask for references, but if they had them, they would be even more confident. Of course you could have lied them, but it would be pointless. You were going to live with them for a long term, and anyway the probably would have notice something’s wrong. Human senses are very sophisticated: the brain processes consciously or unconsciously the information they receive and generates feelings and reactions.

After some conversations you couldn’t get much information of the person you talked with. His presence is now to general and it can recall many different people. Perhaps the number of words, the use of the language… the contents of the dialogue were to specific to infer anything. This is no key step in the construction of the presence of an individual and the necessary trust. It’s just an arrangement to meet with unknown but apparently trustworthy people.

Only one click, and you received some more posts, offering apartments to share…you found one which seemed affordable! It also described a bit about the personality of the roommates and what they were looking for… The ad was long, they seemed talkative… and even though they could have been anyone in this city!

The first thing to do was thinking about my own…what I was doing here, some facts of my life, and a bit about myself and the image that I wanted to project. I needed to be conscious not only of my presence but also about the presence I wanted the others to perceive and the telepresence linked to these. Controlling my own expression trough email was very easy. I could show my letter to some friends and follow their advisement to correct not only the formal language but also the contents that should recall the presence of the ideal roommate. I was creating an avatar of my presence. It didn’t need to be accurate, just efficient for the purposes it was supposed to achieve.

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The more trust we want to have, the more information we need. The telepresence must be somehow tangible, in order to become reliable. The diversity of the sources is also very important. As well as their credibility. However some questions still remain. How much do we want to control the presentation of ourselves knowing that also another people could do the same? Should we create media to track every aspect of our presence and increase the awareness of our expressions? Is the common agreement the most reliable source to trust someone? Would it be possible to abolish some of our social rules in order to strengthen everyone’s personality or are they too important to keep the safety and the collective sense of trust?

To increase the reliability we need a system to get more information about one individual using alternative sources. Some work already, like the credit check, or the reference letters. However, there must be a way to use the ranking system used commercial environments such as Amazon or Ebay to build a community of people who talk about a former roommate to keep his/her profile. I would be a mash up of sites like craigslist, roommates.com, or facebook. Or it could also be an application for this last one in order to put it in relation with the other to get a more enriched view over the profile of someone.
Again I wonder, do we really wanted? I guess the answer would belong however not to the concepts of trust and presence, but to the field of privacy and surveillance.

here.

and make sure to check the slide-show.

all this reminds me of a series of pieces written by errol morris for the nyt. he delves into the idea of truth in photography starting with some iconic images and dissects our assumptions from there. i’ve always been interested in the aura of trust which surrounds certain art-forms. street photography seems more real to us and more trustworthy than studio photography, for example. the roughness of an image implies an honesty that may or may not apply. a photo with less obvious intention, less inflection, buys a certain amount of trust, like the artistic equivalent of the duality of what we put out in the world vs. what we give out. (is that the terminology we’ve been using?) and you can see this now in things like videoblogging. somehow, an individual with low-tech means lays claim to a whole realm of “realness” that a more produced product can’t. but, are these assumptions valid, or is it just a conditioned response? a response to the lack of trustworthiness so visible in more “finished” media? things get interesting as bigger media co-opt these symptoms of realness. to what degree are we responding to stylistic cues that may have nothing to do with the content’s truthfulness? (i can’t get the race for the presidential nomination out of my head. can you?)

and just briefly, regarding the reading: i was early to meet my valentine date by two hours because of a gig that ended early. it was cold. i was underdressed. i didn’t have my school ID. and one can only spend so much time in the strand. and i can tell you that even in the “sophisticated” city there is no Third Place. or more precisely, there is no third place without a ricky martin-esque soundtrack and overpriced mochachinos.

liss

While reading the excerpt from “The Great Good Place”, the idea of trust often popped into my head. Being American born, I can definitely agree with a lot of the theories and opinions mentioned in the reading. Most of America is paranoid, especially the suburbs. Most of us don’t have these informal places to gather and socialize, so in return we never really get to know our neighbors. Because of the lack of introduction, we start to form paranoid opinions about them. The nightly news tells us about all the murders, kidnappings, and rapes. The government talks about the emergence of terrorism amongst us. And, since we have no real place to meet and disprove all these rumors it just simply marinates within us. It almost seems like someone has put all the pieces in place for a socially retarded, emotionally overcompensating, and excessively paranoid America. It’s funny that a fix for all these deep and tangled problems is simply to give us a place to meet each other. An informal place that allows us to casually encounter one another and befriend each other at a pace that is suitable for all of us.

It sorta remind me of what you’re supposed to do when you’re getting two dogs to befriend each other. You bring them both to a place that neither of them feel in control of, like a public park, so that there is no preceded dominance. They are essentially on equal footing.

Project proposal to follow.

If many masks are being presented together, then a well-rounded, sometimes, controversial  personality could be revealed. Like gtalk or aim or msn. There’s an icon place for you to show yourself, you can name your name, your feeling now,  your statues now, sometimes even what music / game you’re playing now. The “me” is presented to my friends, to my parents, to my students, to my boss, even to semi stranger who knows you, while I don’t know him/her. All happen at the same time. Sometimes, I started struggling which mask am I going to wear? Which part of me am I going to present to such diverse audience? Which picture icon?

Then sometimes, in such a messy situation with all diverse audience being in one IM, some IM is being abandoned. And their friends, business contacts, relatives, students, schoolmates, who are important to them are being transported to other places.

In China, QQ probably is the IM with the largest number of users in the world. It’s very early to come into people’s life, especially teens, around 1997 or even earlier, and it’s also so different than telephone which could easily be mapped to the real person, and there were also a lot of chatting room for strangers to meet. So later on, it’s very well known for meeting strangers or semi strangers in QQ. But of course, friends, relatives also use that. So QQ number used to be very hot and you had to pay for that and it was also harder and harder to get new numbers later in 2004 or 2005. But at that time, to those people who adopted it earlier, they started abandon QQ number,  because the mask was too true to some of their contacts, and too false to some others. (In fact, people filter their contacts, and if possible, transferred their valuable contacts to other IMs.)

It’s such an interesting phenomenon and I want to collect abandoned QQ number and find the stories about them.

Trust can be established through shared experience, proximity, familiarity, even through momentary eye contact. With the advent and mass adoption of personal, hand-held technologies, we have become enclosed within our own technology-generated isolation bubbles, insulated, via distraction, from even the most basic social interactions. In the midst of public spaces, we’re absorbed in private worlds of information, music, gaming, personal communication, etc. The less we look up to acknowledge each other, the fewer opportunities we have to assess the trustworthiness of those in our immediate environment, to establish the split-second connection or mutual understanding that can occur when we exchange a few words or glances with strangers in the park, on the subway, or in the street.

My proposal for encouraging trust is a telepresence intervention that acts over very short distances. This is a device or program installed on wireless hand-held devices. The aim is to encourage social interaction by asserting individual presences over a short range, encouraging them to collide with each other and compromise the techno-isolation-bubble. If I sit next to you on the subway and we’re both listening to portable MP3 players, your song may momentarily spill over into my player, encouraging me to notice and acknowledge you and my position and relation to you in public space. Data jostling may collect slight snippets of words from phone calls or emails or text messages in and scatter them out into the space, where they’re gathered by other jostling-enabled devices in the area, and prompt those users to consider other around them. Data jostling not only provides opportunities to create trust, but also highlights the division between public spaces and private once, encouraging users to consider how they construct their public and private presences, and the differences between them.

zannah

In preparation to our visit to the HP Halo Telepresence studio, I watched the demo video and that was the tag line at the end. They make it sound so futuristic and easy!

Another aspect they highlight is security. “It is a proprietary channel, so [the video conference] is private and secure,” says the female voice over. This ties into this week’s topic of trust. In this case not only does trust need to be established between the users, but also between the users and the producers.

It is understandable that people might question the trust of producers. As viewers, we have become accustom to questioning what we are seeing. There are countless examples, but this ad is a great illustration. It appears to be real, yet the whole production is staged (and fake).

As a viewer, we have little control or insight to what we are seeing. Ironically, participants often lack control too. A recent NYTimes article discusses how the presidential candidates have been caught in often compromising and revealing moments captured by camera-wielding reporters.

These exmaples demonstrate how gaining and losing trust is something that seems to be happening from all sides. The world telepresence is no different. HP’s emphasis on a “secure” production environment is certainly done with the concerns of their customers in mind.

Trust project idea to follow.

Trust always comes with some conditions. If someone tells you that she/he trusts you, they mean ‘I trust you so you shouldn’t let me down.’ Because of that, people are very surprised when that trust feeling is broken. That might be disappointment but it can be a shock. If this concept can shock people, this will be the great start of art.

Live video is the part of things people easily believe, but can people really tell the difference between the two scenes of the space which isn’t really affected by the weather and doesn’t have a lot of people if one is from yesterday and the other is on live. I’m thinking about the display of two videos of the same place but different time. The interesting thing about this idea is that some people might not notice the difference but some of them may find out.

Jain

Why should I trust you? Because you sound trustworthy? Smell trustworthy? Look trustworthy? How do we measure trust?

Trust Vision is a personally biased trust measuring video camera. As each frame is presented, a face or faces within the frame are superimposed with trust ratings based on previous faces that have been rated by the user. Over time, the computer creates a mental map of facial features of a trustworthy individual. The real-time analysis of facial features is aided by the user’s bias, as he or she discretely changes the trust ratings of individuals on the screen. Changes in the mental map may “out” a previously trusted person or improve someone’s standing.

(image manipulated from original by manitou2121, an interesting composite of faces from hotornot.com)

I was thinking about creating the “flat” truth in communication situations involving mediated presence.  It’s true that few people today accept the existence of a “flat” truth when technology is the facilitator. Mass media exposure and editing technologies have eroded the credibility of what we see on screens. In light of our cynicism, should mediated communication pursue the representation of “reality” as a way of creating trust?  In his talk at ITP on Friday, Ken Goldberg defined medium as “that which facilitates perception of objects or between subjects… it is a lens which both transmits and distorts.”  Since we generally assume that some level of distortion takes place in any mediated communication, it may be that the best way to create a sense of trust in what is presented to us lies outside of a reality-based approach.  But where should un-reality come from?  Should it be the job of a computer to manipulate the images of participants, to enhance distortion to capture body movement and gesture rather than words?   Erving Goffman discusses how the capacity of an individual to give impressions involves both the “impressions that the gives and the expressions that he gives off.”  If we focus on subtle things that a person “gives off” we may be more inclined to trust it because we feel that the individual has less control or ability to manipulate this presentation.  While a computer can visual data and present it in new ways—attempting, perhaps, to capture as many perspectives as possible, I think it might be interesting if the perspectives of the human participants were used to create the same sort of amplification in interchanges.

Proposal: Me N U.
I See Me N U is an exploration of the ways that physical representation and distortion exists between two individuals who participate in a tele-converstation.  The participants  (who are in different rooms, cities or countries) both sit in front of a screen with a console which allows them to operate a pan tilt camera which is physically located with, and focused on, the other person.  Audio functions exactly like a phone conversation, allowing Person A to have a conversation with Person B.   The screen however, is like a mirror, reflecting Person A back to person A—except that their image is controlled by the camera linked to the console operated by person B. Thus, each person is seeing themselves from the “perspective” o=f the other person.  Because the other person is controlling the camera blind—they can’t see what the camera is seeing—the person ma bee seeing themselves in from odd angles, or bizarre positions.  However, when both people move the pan or tilt of the camera in the same direction simultaneously, the screen briefly flickers/displays the image of the other person on the participants’ screen, perhaps motivating them to readjust the camera to produce another perspective for contemplation when the screen reverts to the participant’s self- image.  In forcing the people to watch themselves and only intermittently (and through concerted action) see the person with whom they are interacting, Me N U plays with our own (re)presentation and the authenticity of what we “give off” in communicating with other people.

Kacie Kinzer

What about communicating with people who want something from you.  or you want something from them. Perhaps you just met them or you know them but don’t like them. The cues for building trust are subtle so you may look for a system that captures and conveys as much of a scene as possible. Audio/Visual conferences seem to provide the greatest volume of information. Cameras built into screens, as in a teleprompter set up, seem to provide the least parallax between what a person is looking at and what they appear to be looking at. You want to be sure he can see her looking at him. At HP we will see quite a lot of work going into conveying these subtleties. But we are used to use our bodies to probe a scene and video does not change perspective when we move our heads. Maybe instead of striving to convey the flat truth from one perspective we could get more perspectives conveyed in a cubist collage. Maybe we will get more trust from a visualization of the pixel data than the picture. Maybe each image is alpha blend into a time motion study to point out where people are fidgeting, and make obvious who is hogging the mic. We also trust more what is harder to fake. While we seem to lean most heavily on visual cues, they are the most often manipulated both in front of the camera and in software afterwards. The tone of your voice might betray more. We might even reach beyond the cues conveyed in ordinary conversation, for instance adding galvanic skin response to our telecommunications.