A panel discussion at Siggraph called into question the very notion of reality in the information age. Nothing new, right? After all, virtual reality is a hot topic at this week's computer-graphics conference in Los Angeles. The odd thing is that Thursday's panel had nothing to do with virtual reality.
The Interfacing Reality panel - organized and moderated by UC Berkeley telerobotic pioneer Eric Paulos and featuring robotic scientists and artists John Canny, Mark Pauline, Ken Goldberg, and Eduardo Kac - explored the interface between humans and machines in remote spaces, linked together via the Internet.
The uncrackable conundrum of the day: If you're interacting with the world via a Webcam and a robot, how can you be absolutely sure that what you're experiencing is live, and not Memorex?
Goldberg says the authenticity issue frequently reared its head when he first demonstrated his Telegarden, a physical garden robotically tended by a community of users on the Web.
"I'd show the garden to a group of people visiting the lab, and suddenly the robot arm would move," Goldberg said. "At least one visitor would always doubt that it was being moved by some anonymous person somewhere in the world. At the same time, the users on the Net constantly doubted that they were interacting with a real garden."
These kinds of experiments, Goldberg explained, could be considered exercises not in epistemology, but in telepistemology - how we know what we know when our perception is technologically mediated. And Doubting Thomases have valid reasons for their telepistemological concerns. Several early Webcams - including one allegedly peeking into a bathroom stall and another trained on a fish tank - were later revealed to be fakes.
Even though several years have passed since the first Webcams appeared online, Paulos faces similar skepticism surrounding the PRoPS, he develops at Berkeley with Canny. The two PRoPS on display in Siggraph's Electric Garden include a telerobotic blimp and a cart robot rigged with a pointing arm. Outfitted with video cameras and microphones, both robots can be controlled from a Web site for exploration and interaction in a remote space.
"We put a tremendous amount of work into these projects to make it clear that what the user is experiencing is real, and people still don't believe us," Paulos said. "We've even been complimented on our 'efforts to trick users into thinking they were controlling real robots.'"
As a result, Paulos, Pauline, Canny, Goldberg, and Judith Donath of the MIT Media Lab decided to exploit users' suspension of disbelief in a Web art project called Legal Tender. At the site, users can access a robot to burn, puncture, or otherwise test $100 bills to determine whether the green is good or counterfeit - and whether or not they committed a federal crime by destroying currency.
Paulos and Pauline, director of the machine performance group Survival Research Laboratories, recently intensified the telerobotic Turing Tests by building a system that enables anonymous users on the Web to control a high-power air cannon that fires cement-filled soda cans. It was the first time, the two noted, that lethal machinery was tele-operated over the Net.
"Part of the fun for me is knowing that people online are wondering if what they're doing is fake, or if police are going to be knocking on their door any minute because things accidentally got out of hand," Pauline said.
