Social affective touch for robots

My past research on psychohaptics and taptap at the Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Laboratory, involved studying the perception of touch, and how people relate affectively to haptic sensations. Today, Dr Cynthia Breazeal who leads the Robotic Life research group at the MIT Media Laboratory addressed the question of social affective touch. Her main theme is to build cooperative machines that work and learn in partnership with people.
Today at the h2.0 event -new minds, new bodies, new identities- she presented her latest research including the robotic companion. The robotic life group explores social affective touch and develops machine learning algorithms to categorize various sense of touch, from pleasant to annoying ones. Exploring the sense of touch and interpretation of touch by robots is a new area of research.
The robot is designed in the form of a bear, the bear being a universal symbol of comfort. The robot itself is covered of silicone skin to not feel like a machine when hugged. In their first experiments, the robot had local intelligence, local sensing and response, coordination. An operator could communicate with the bear to a 3d bear model on a screen.

Applications behind this work could be for family members to be able to play from everywhere, to bridge the usual generation gap between grandparents and grandchildren, to allow people to remain in contact while separated. This is especially important when a child is spending a day at the hospital alone and what it means for the parents to be able to stay with the child remotely.
Another high vision for this work is to allow collaborative partnership using a remote tutor. Cynthia mentioned that eventually the bear could be highly trained and could offer high quality education to the ones who usually are not exposed to such education.

Cool online social stuff

Bumplist

During Chi, I had a few gatherings with my old school friends from Media Lab Europe. This reminded me how fun it was to be beta tester for each other's project. Back in Dublin, I tried out Jonah and Mike's Bumplist.

BumpList only allows for a minimum amount of subscribers so that when a new person subscribes, the first person to subscribe is "bumped", or unsubscribed from the list.

Via Jonah again, I tested the super fun myfrienenemies social community. Basically, on this site, anyone can post anonymously about their enemies and connect to others through their enemies.

The Viscous Display

The Viscous Display created by Lily Shirvanee and Glorianna Davenport is a transient adaptive interface for collective play in public space.

Grounded on Henri Lefevre analysis of production of space as a social phenomenon, the viscous display proposes a space with transient meanings by exhanging social information through adaptive public interfaces.

Abstract: The Viscous Display explores the exchange of social information through transient public interfaces. Shaped by principles of ‘underground public art’, the Viscous Display is conceived as a novel mobile communication medium, where messages can be shared in public spaces. Inspired by biological learning systems; the Viscous Display learns sensorial information that form along traces of a participant’s touch and maps this information onto a flexible display.
Because it is made up of inexpensive materials, the Viscous Display is also a disposable artifact that may be collected in public spaces. It combines multi-modal sensing, learning algorithms, and a pliable silicone display.

Paper

Viscous display's web site

Couture for dogs

Kazuko Ryokai tailors clothes for tiny dogs. Her love for dogs and passion for pattern making made her create a line of clothing in Japan.

More on her web site - Keep in Touch Tokyo

Touch Sensitive Apparel at Chi 2007

Poster presented at Chi 2007

Our Touch Sensitive apparel is inspired by the vision to leverage stress, comfort, and massage people while they are on the move. When always on the move, as an interview based study has shown, people use technological devices to “tune-out” or express their fear of technology by finding “a place where [their] soul is” . What if objects that people carry with them and even carry on them could offer this sensory comfort that they seem to seek?

More on our Touch Sensitive Apparel.

Inspiration In hypermobile societies, people carry objects, information and goods. They develop habits. The notion of habitus coined by Bourdieu relates to everything that someone does, and in fact defines the individual. The search for comfort, to feel at home (to inhabit space through hab-its, habitus) when on the move defines the populations of our hyper-societies.

Design
Touch·Sensitive is a work-in-progress to develop a series of haptic modules that allow computational massage therapy to be diffused, customized and controlled by people on the move. It provides individuals with a sensory cocoon. Our current prototypes succeeded in defining a flexible structure, a mechanism of diffusion, and a feedback system for alerting and comforting the user through haptic means.
In addition, we propose to integrate machine-learning algorithms to understand the massage needs of the users through the analysis over time of the correlation between the motions of the user, the location of the pressure points, the intensity and qualities of the stimulus. We plan to develop these next steps along with specialists in massage therapy.

Download Chi 2007 WIP paper

Touch Sensitive Apparel was presented at Chi 2007. Enthusiasm, advices, references, and new ideas inspired by the visitors will lead a new prototype this summer.

Emotive type

Typography requires distinct design metrics with which to evaluate and understand its aesthetic and semantic effect. As such, the attributes of each letterform can be discretely mapped to various meanings that they represent.


Emotive type

I chatted more with Daniela K. Rosner at Chi'07 today. She showed me some of her work, and I particularly loved her work on emotive type using text transformation to convey emotions. She also did user test the concept.

In experiments one and two, users viewed a series of 30 kinetic text animations chosen at random from four emotion-animation mappings; they were asked to report whether they felt the emotion evoked by the animation was similar to or different from the name of the emotion represented. In the third experiment, users viewed a series of 32 varying animations of the word “information.” They were asked to select the emotion from the list of 15 that they felt conveyed same emotions as the animation. (...) Based on the results of both the second and third experiments, positive animations were more than twice as likely to be reported by users as highly correlated. Although users reported correlations of varying consistency among animation-emotion pairs, animations that involved less graphic complexity also ranked higher than those that did not. Interestingly, the emotion-animation pairs that ranked highest in their user’s reported correlation value also made more explicit use of metaphor than those that did not.

Guitar hero becomes guitaroke

Aurelius Prochazka, a big fan of Guitar Hero, developped a Guitaraoke Revolution game. Apparently an amazing guitar and ear workout, he offers how to play the Guitaroke Revolution using a simple hack. Basically, "splice your Karaoke Revolution microphone so that the microphone ends in a plug and the USB converter end has a jack" ...
More details on .apb.

Culturally embedded computing and HCI challenges

At Chi 2007 I met with Lucian Leahu, researcher from the culturally embedded computing group at Cornell University. The group researches on affective computing by considering the cultural context in which people are in while interacting with computers.

We analyze, design, build, and evaluate computing devices in cultural context. We analyze the ways in which technologies reflect and perpetuate unconscious cultural assumptions, and design, build, and test new computing devices that reflect alternative possibilities for technology. We are part of a community of critical technical practices [as coined by Phil Agre], or practices that integrate technical system-building with cultural, philosophical, and critical reflection on technical practice. We have a focus on reflective design, or design practices that help both users and designers reflect on their experiences and the role technology plays in those experiences. We work with collaborators in the Affective Presence coalition to develop an approach to affective computing in which the full complexity of human emotions and relationships as experienced by users in central to design (rather than the extent to which computers can understand and process those emotions) (...)

For instance, their ongoing Fear Reflector project aims to support emotional self-reflection of people while they expect to confront their fears. Using a combination of biometry and camera input, it takes pictures of situation in which the user "fears". People are then given the possibility to reflect on these "fear" contexts.

The group had a few papers being presented at Chi 2007. I attended a very impressive talk from their group How HCI Interprets the Probes. They discuss the research techniques of Bill Gaver called Cultural probes that uncover people's values and activities. They discuss how the HCI community craving for flexible design methods adopted and adapted the probes in their research. By Kirsten Boehner, Janet Vertesi, Phoebe Sengers, and Paul Dourish (from Irvine), How HCI Interprets the Probes.
.Pdf of the Paper.
Also a nice interview of Bill Gaver on Designing Interactions for reference.
Another very inspiring take on HCI is to look at Situationist art practice. The authors specify how the Chi community can be relunctant to consider these methods, or by reducing them to comform to Chi's ones instead of using the richness of these methods.
.Pdf of the Chi'07 paper by Lucian Leahu, Phoebe Sengers, Claudia Pederson, Jennifer Thom-Santelli and Pavel Dmitriev.
Of course, nice references on situationism with video and sound recordings of Guy Debord on Ubu. The most famous and studied book-movie of Guy Debord being Society of the Spectacle.

ReadyMade: How to Make (Almost) Everything

Beautifully designed ReadyMade book by Shoshana Berger and Grace Hawthorne.

Written by the cofounders of ReadyMade magazine, this is a book of all original material that revolves around the reuse of six building materials—paper, plastic, wood, metal, glass and fabric. This hybrid of how­to, editorial and historical content yielded a design that is simultaneously smart and fun, structured yet chaotic, sophisticated yet accessible.
In the spirit of ReadyMade’s reuse ethos, the book itself is a reusable object, with the spine serving as a ruler—inches on the front cover, centimeters on the back. Since the book’s content swings wildly from do­it­yourself projects and scientific diagrams to lifestyle articles, historical timelines and random sidebar nuggets of information, we deliberately pushed ourselves out of the usual structural comfort zones of contemporary book design—limited typeface use, repetitive grid structure, white space—to see how much variety the piece could sustain and still be coherent. - Aiga

Tilt and feel

Shoogle, created by John Williamson, Roderick Murray-Smith, Stephen Hughes at the University of Glasgow, UK, is an interface for sensing data within a mobile device.

It is based around active exploration: devices are shaken, revealing the contents rattling around “inside”. Vibrotactile display and realistic impact sonification create a compelling system. Inertial sensing is used for completely eyes-free, single-handed interaction that is entirely natural.

Download the Shoogle's paper for Chi 2007
Video of Shoogle

Stephen Hughes was previously a researcher in the Palpable Machines research group with Sile O'Modhrain at Media Lab Europe. The group published key papers on vibrotactile display and mobile multi-modal interfaces.


MESH an iPaq running a simple tilt-driven maze game by the Palpable Machines group