A Quick Look at Robots and Telepresence
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Telepresence, in a sense, refers to the ability to be somewhere that you actually aren’t. While videoconferencing can be thought of as a type of telepresence, some people have been able to go way beyond that, thanks to the use of robotics and related technologies. If you’ve ever fantasized about sending a robot to go to work or school for you, keep reading.
If you work two jobs and face a longer-than-average commute to one of them, like Hiroshi Ishiguro, you might understand why the robotics scientist created a duplicate of himself. Constructed of silicone and steel, the robot's external features (like its face and hands) were cast from Ishiguro himself. But it's what is under the surface that's most remarkable.
Human beings never sit completely still. We breathe, tap our foot, look around, blink, fidget, cock our heads, and make other small, almost meaningless movements that no robot would have any reason to make. But Ishiguro's replica boasts small actuators and semiautonomous motion programs. Ishiguro can make the robot, named "Geminoid HI-1," move in certain ways through a program, but all by itself, it makes the kind of small movements that one would expect of a living man.
The android also contains a speaker within its body. When Ishiguro speaks through a microphone, his voice comes through the android. Geminoid's lips synch up with the sound, thanks to motion capture sensors worn by the android's operator. It seems like quite a bit of effort to avoid the commute to his teaching job at Osaka University (to say nothing of his other job at ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories), but there is much more going on here.
"I want to check whether students, as well as my family, can feel my presence through Geminoid," explained Ishiguro in an interview with Wired. Just seeing a picture of Ishiguro and his artificial twin together can be a bit disconcerting. The resemblance is convincing, but not quite perfect. The android wears glasses to match Ishiguro, but they are slightly too high on his face. Indeed, the face in general is a little too elongated (especially around the nose), the skin tone too pale and even. And one wonders if Ishiguro was contemplating the lengthy commute that Geminoid is supposed to help him avoid when the android's mask was cast; more than one observer has commented on that scowling face.
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