the moss steiger shift

Why We Want Our Robots to Like Us

Are you polite when you talk to Siri, or Cortana, or any of the other machines in your life?

Most of us are, experts say, even though what we’re actually talking to is nothing more than compiled code – an endless stream of 1s and 0s with no real personality or feelings. 

So why is it that, when interacting with personal digital assistants or the emerging breed of companion robots, we feel the need to be polite, to be friendly, to want our machines to like us back?

The answer may be quite straightforward: Just like our machines, we’re simply wired that way.

A young woman demonstrates the “Auto Mignon,” a new German record player which can be attached to the dashboard of a car, at the International Industrial Fair in Hannover, West Germany, May 12, 1959.

The Augmented Reality Sandbox 

The Augmented Reality Sandbox (orginally developed by researchers at UC Davis) lets users sculpt mountains, canyons and rivers, then fill them with water or even create erupting volcanoes. This version of the device at UCLA was built by Gary Glesener using off-the-shelf parts and good ol’ playground sand.

Sit for parasols, stand for factories and kneel for tea.

Brand Killer

Student project by Reed Rosenbluth, Jonathan Dubin, Tom Catullo, and Alex Crits-Christoph is a proof-of-concept Augmented Reality version of Ad-Block, censoring brand logos that appear in the real world - video embedded below:

Corporate branding and advertisements are ubiquitous in society today and impossible to avoid. What if we lived in a world where consumers were blind to the excesses of corporte branding? Brand Killer is a technology demonstration of a future world in which consumers can empower themselves using augmented reality to literally ignore corporate influence. We built head mounted display which uses openCV image processing to recognize and block brands and logos from the user’s point of view in real time. It’s AdBlock for Real Life.

The Sword of Damocles

Early pioneering tech from 1968 is a stereoscopic headmounted display created by Ivan Sutherland, the first Virtual Reality technology:

Computer graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland models a stereoscopic display he created at Harvard using miniature TV tubes. An early application showed a three-dimensional wire-frame virtual room that users could explore by moving their heads.

I couldn’t locate a demonstration of the wireframe rooms (but if anyone knows … let me know!)

Images above are from the Computer History Museum here and here

THE RISE AND FALL AND RISE OF VIRTUAL REALITY

In the wake of Facebook’s purchase of Oculus VR, can this revolutionary technology triumph anew?