A new coordinator for a new project
Starting to coordinate a project designing improved telepresence during the isolated times of COVID-19 is exciting! One gets constantly reminded profoundly of all the challenges we are taking up on this project, as well as the need for solutions. For the first proper project meeting last December, one participant got stuck in Namibia for the worsened COVID-situation, and I myself was barely recuperating from a flue which got negative COVID-test results just in time for the meeting. I had to consider until the morning of the first meeting day, whether I should go on-site to the meeting, or participate remotely from home with all the challenges and limitations there exist in multi-day teleconference presence.
As a researcher, the whole of my personal research interest focuses on the study of sentience and artificial intelligence. Sentience is the fundamental “experience”, and BIT::TIP in particular focuses on the user experience.
An important part of telepresence is the second part of the term – the presence, which has two distinct sides. The first side is then sense of you being there. Sensing the virtual place and feeling like you can have influence there with confirming feedback of your actions. Having your own attention focused less on where your physical body is located, or how to operate the equipment providing you telepresence, and more on the activity within the virtual place itself. The second side is the sense of others being there. Sensing, who is currently talking, is anyone there with you at all, and what exactly are they doing. Ultimately, what are the others focused on? On sentience, I am personally leaning towards Michael S. A. Graziano’s theory, where sentience is the cyclic conception of awareness of awareness, where the evolutionary origin lies in the ability to be aware of what others are aware of. We are naturally aware of what others are aware of, and thus, in shared spaces this needs to be possible too.
This is why the research on eye-contact in videoconferencing is important. It is not important that we have eye-contact, but that we can have control over eye-contact.
We are now at the beginning of a 4-year project to address this very fundamental issue of telepresence and teleconferencing. It will be interesting to see what we will be able to discover. What technological solutions? What new questions? Right next to us big business companies are investing heavily on mixed reality, essentially based just on Moore’s Law – we now have more processing power to improve the speed and quality of audio-visuals, so we can “do the old thing better and faster”. BIT::TIP is looking outside that box and questioning what exactly should be done and how.