Telepresence

Meeting in neutral territory can facilitate better communication. In “The Good Great Place” Oldham talks about the benefits of bars and cafes where you are free of expectations and long term entanglements of work and home. Virtual worlds such as Second Life attempt to provide such a third place but they lack a feeling of presence. Speaking on the phone, I feel like I am occupying a third space, not my surroundings and not trying to envision the other side, more located in the middle distance where you are looking at something but not focused it. Perhaps phones work so well because the shared mind space is not weighed down by being visualized but there are advantages to seeing the other person’s face. I felt like the blandness of the HP background in the HP setup deemphasized context to have people floating in an abstract space. The curved in the table continuing between locations united it into a single non existent space.

I would like to create a hybrid space with video like the HP set up and synthetic coordinate system like virtual worlds. I hope to get the richness of expression and feeling of presence from video conferencing but the freedom from distraction of portraying real visual context.

I want to build a device for video conferencing into a hat. I want to use the camera from a cell phone built into a hat as we saw in the Greenday video to capture your face. The other people will be displayed on the screen of the cell phone but you will have to to move your neck (see Lanier) to look from one person to the next in the conference. I want your head as displayed to other people to actually appear turned towards the person your are looking at (the thing HP could not do). To do this I will have to get compass readings from the hat, together with the image from the camera to be sent to a server and distributed to other participants.