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Michael and Michael are looking for AR, in all the right places!  The Games at Work team starts  things off right, with a discussion on the final games of the NCAA basketball tournament, and how your best braketology picks can now hover above your screen in augmented reality (example above).  Earlier today, during the Woody Durham Celebration of Life, Michael M spoke with a friend about how technology has enabled the game experience to get better and better over the years, first with radio, then television, then the graphics ribbon to show the score & stats, then to Intel’s current capability to give the viewer an immersive front row seat, to the possibilities of the future, including real time stats for each player hovering above them, adjustable camera angles, and the ability to virtually sit in any seat in the stadium.  The future is so bright, we have to wear mixed reality shades to experience it all! 

From sports to art — we have the example of Artopia, an app that provides the ability to geocache drawings anywhere on the planet, using your mobile device’s GPS and interface to draw.  Michael and Michael easily imagine a situation where it could be that there are multiple layers of reality, where different apps (and maybe different paywalls) allow the user to experience many different things depending on when, where, and how the place is experienced, and with what app. 

Aria’s smart glasses provide another way for those with visual impairments to experience the visual world, with a hardware enabled service to provide feedback to the wearer on what they are seeing, through a combination of human agents and AI technology to help the wearer understand their surroundings better.  The wearer can contact a person who can help them navigate to their doctor’s office, or use the AI named Chloe to read them the text that is in their field of view.  Michael and Michael imagine that haptics and bone conduction could be helpful for the user to be able to use the capabilities of the device in a less obtrusive way. 

The pair then shifts gears to more tangible things, such as a PC that you can build with a PC simulator and a robotic tank that will deliver the payload of a cold beer to you when you ask Alexa to send it.  

Winding up on the robotic front, the pair take a look at the results from a University of Washington in Seattle paper “Characterizing the Design Space of Rendered Robot Faces” presented at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction.  Remembering the conversation from the last episode on a robotic tortoise teaching children how to not mistreat the robot, Michael and Michael explore what might make for the friendliest interaction between a human and a robot.  Both Michaels felt like the less detail/less realism end of the spectrum was potentially more friendly and easy to interact with vs the uncanny valley reaction for those that are more realistic with more detail.  Interesting to note that Jibo (discussed in episode 187) was one of the example robot faces used.  Also interesting was a comment on the page reminding that some of the best examples of robots had no faces at all — R2D2 and BB-8.

What do you think makes for an excellent human robot interaction that would win high marks for friendliness, trust and intelligence?

Selected Links

March Madness Live app — https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ncaa-march-madness-live/id423246594?mt=8 

GoHeels article by Adam Lucas – Hey Woody — http://goheels.com/news/2018/4/8/adam-lucas-lucas-hey-woody.aspx 

Intel Technology at NCAA — https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/sports/intel-technology-at-ncaa.html 

TechCrunch article: Hide 3D paintings anywhere with AR app Artopia — https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/28/hide-3d-paintings-anywhere-with-ar-app-artopia/ 

TechCrunch article: Aira’s new smart glasses give blind users a guide through the visual world — https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/27/airas-new-smart-glasses-give-blind-users-a-guide-through-the-visual-world/ 

Aira — https://aira.io 

Bone conduction — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_conduction 

TechCrunch article:  Build your own PC inside the PC you built with the PC Building Simulator — https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/27/build-your-own-pc-inside-the-pc-you-built-with-pc-building-simulator/ 

TechCrunch article:  This DIY, Alexa-connected robotic tank will bring you a beer — https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/26/this-diy-alexa-connected-robotic-tank-will-bring-you-a-beer/ 

IEEE Spectrum article:  What People See in 157 Robot Faces — https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/what-people-see-in-157-robot-faces 

ACM Digital Library — Characterizing the Design Space of Rendered Robot Faces — https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3171286 

Episode 196 — Fish Lips — https://gamesatwork.biz/2018/03/26/episode-196-fish-lips/ 

TechCrunch article:  This tortoise shows kids that robot abuse is bad — https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/20/this-tortoise-shows-kids-that-robot-abuse-is-bad/ 

Uncanny Valley — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley 

Episode 187 —  Bionic Eye — https://gamesatwork.biz/2017/12/11/episode-187-bionic-eye/  

Episode 159 — Virtually Secure — https://gamesatwork.biz/2017/01/22/episode-159-virtually-secure/

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