pervasive media studio

We were able to build a simple prototype robot with a little added theatre: the end result is an installation with a relaxing atmosphere and a robotic entity that seems to look at you, listen to you, know how you're feeling, converse with you through instant chat and play music it thinks will help with your mood.

I tried to create a 'living room' feel, so that you are sitting comfortably next to your Daemon in low light, with music playing. This is to create a relaxed atmosphere in which you might like to confide private feelings with your Daemon, as you might with a trusted friend or therapist or indeed, as was my original idea, as you would converse with yourself, the Daemon being your own inner voice made visible.

In this first very early stage, with two months R&D and a very small budget, I asked Tarim and Dan to help me make a simple prototype in a few days. We used Arduino and servos within the robot body to allow its head to move side to side and turn on one side in a 'listening' position. A web cam and face tracking allows it to follow your face, again to give the impression of 'listening' and being interested. Tarim made a text interface so that the user and Daemon could chat with each other instantaneously. This works automatically, using prewritten replies and questions I had written for the Daemon in the style of a very simple chat-bot. The user types into their laptop and the Daemon speaks on its own monitor next to it, as if this is your domestic TV screen or monitor. Having identified my desire to be able to manually chat and operate or 'puppet' Daemon too, Tarim built a manual override into the system. For me as a writer/performer who loves improvising with the audience via characters, this is great fun. It means that what the Daemon says and does can be 'puppeted' either entirely manually (as in via computer commands) or as a mixture with the automated chat-bot. This is a very important tool for this platform.

The next tool we have is the Daemon's ability to change music when you squeeze its hand. Dan was able to set this up (we have a button hidden in the robot's hand)and his next step is to make it work with iTunes. I'm keen that the Daemon works as an interface with iTunes, as Daemon is about communicating emotion, particularly through music. Perhaps in future Daemon will read your emotions via BCI. For now I'm liking the 'fortune teller' approach whereby it tells you to squeeze it's hand and think your most private thoughts, desires, fears and it will understand them, playing you music and giving you suggestions it thinks will help and comfort you.

And here's one I made earlier:

I made the prototype this time to look like the aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, partly because as a child I desperately wanted them to come and take me away like they did Roy Neary. I sat at my piano playing that little five-note tune over and over. That movie has influenced me in many ways and here it pops up again. Since I wanted to put pretty much all of my scant budget into paying the programming tech brains, I had to make the robot body in a Blue Peterish way using tupper-ware boxes and humous pots covered in fabric. The head is papier mache. I tell you I had to do a lot of learning to make that bloody thing. Mainly how many glues, no matter how expensive, do NOT stick polyethyline and polythene. Nothing on God's earthwould stick the different plastics inside the head to those in the body long enough to stop the damn thing's head falling off every 15 minutes. Therefore it wasn't ready to test on public users by last Wednesday's evening presentation. Instead we made a demo video, which I was able to shoot while it still had its head on. 

The video is on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlF3bR7Erac and photos are or will be very soon, available on the D-Shed website as well as my blog and flickr pages. I'm writing up a proper report of the project and where we're going next with it,so look out for that too. Thanks for following!