
What it feels like being an iPad on a stick on wheels (2013) - dsr12
https://labs.spotify.com/2013/12/12/what-it-feels-like-being-an-ipad-on-a-stick-on-wheels/
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bbarn
Had one of these at our office. I used it as a remote worker on a team across
the country. Few things - the author's wish list is out of date. Mine I could
drive into a dock and it would charge the whole thing and the iPad. The device
is great, and did improve my telepresence significantly.

That said, the problem was consistently that the double robotics website you
must run it through was consistently either down or had such poor bandwidth I
couldn't use it. I wish I could take everything about this device, and host it
in the office. It got to be near unusable most of the time, and we just
switched back to webex. Expensive experiment.

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fsiefken
I wonder if it would give more 'presence' by using it from within VR and a
stereoscopic 360 cam. You would need a way for the double to present in what
direction you are looking at, so perhaps make a cylindrical screen (not sure
if these exist) or a led line with one or two 'eyes' like Kit or a Cylon. This
would solve the problem of the uncanny valley. We have the capability to do
this, but all people can come up with is an uninspired ipad on wheels.

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rhaps0dy
If you were using VR glasses, then no camera could capture your face and show
it on the robot.

It's probably better to control the view direction using the gyroscope on the
tablet that you are holding with your hands.

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fsiefken
Or a CGI generated face with googly eyes. Make the robot head transparent and
spherical, with a one way screen for the stereoscopic camera, and
holographically project your avatar (with googly eyes) inside the sphere
looking in the same direction. A bit like this:
[http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/08/27/3d-sphere-star-
wa...](http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/08/27/3d-sphere-star-wars-
hologram_n_5720810.html)

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osrec
I think this sort of works if the operator is familiar with the surroundings,
but even then, I can see this being rather annoying for others physically
present in the area... Also, I'm not sure what problem this is specifically
solving. If the idea is to give you your own point of view, then toy like
controls probably won't cut it. They should really look to provide an
interface with an AR headset of some kind.

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foobarian
My biggest peeve with one of these were the audio properties. The frequency
response on the speaker is in the high notes, and the audio codec tends to
have artifacts in the high frequencies. Combine these two and you get a shrill
very far carrying sound; as a result whenever someone in our company was using
it it disturbed a vastly larger radius of people than a face-to-face
conversation would have.

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alxmdev
It would be really interesting to read more about the physical participants'
impressions of this. Having a screen on a stick with a live human face on it
follow you around must be quite the uncanny valley.

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bbarn
The people I worked with had a lot of fun with it. They'd dress it up like me,
prank me by putting things in the way I couldn't see, etc. Occasionally they'd
lose their composure at talking to it and start chuckling, the uncanny valley
you mention at work I suppose.

