Robotic Telepresence- Avatars

UCLA IDEAS Technology Studio Seminar Fall 2018

Research Lead: Guvenc Ozel 

Instructors: Benjamin Ennemoser, Gabby Shawcross

Technologies: gaming engines, XR, digital fabrication, projection mapping

Students: Christina Charalampaki, Pratina Chadha, Bohan Cheng, Ruiyang Cheng, Kevin Clark, Haocheng Dai, Yutong Dai, Yue Di, Rui Ding, Lu Geng, Jorge Gutierrez, Vigil Escalera, Hoodeen Hakimian, Ying Huang, So Hyun Kim, Zhou Le, Luo Lei, Yunqi Lei, Zhengtao Liu, Qingyun Lu, Sanjeet Sanjay Mukadam, Narisu Narisu, Nidhi Parsana, Kshama Swamy, Hanshuang Tong, Yiliang Wang, Kan Yen Wu, Xuanyi Xu, Ce Yan, Yixuan Ye, Yicheng Zhao, Yiran Zhou

Beaux Arts Ball 4.0 is a interactive environment for party-goers, in the tradition of the Architecture League of New York’s Ball, within the context of the 4th industrial revolution, using the tools and techniques of mixed-reality, cyber-physical systems, telepresence and automation. In reference to new virtual environments of the Industry 4.0, the seminar proposes a contemporary interpretation of the Beaux Arts Ball, a historic social environment where the participants not only included people but also iconic buildings in form of costumes and other highly staged interactive set design elements. Originating back to the Ecole des Beaux Arts in France, the ball included elaborate costume designs, cross dressing acts, often from human to building, iconic floats on the river Seine and other hedonistic antics that question and re-interpret the presence of humans and require the participation of designed forms in a social space. The design elements in the forms of costumes and sets were intended to be participants in their own right, contributing to the complexity of social interactions through the creation of analternative reality that is visually and experientially different in its very fundamental interpretation of the human body in space and its adjacency to other bodies. The spirit of the Beaux Arts Ball and other historic costume parties where the human body is altered and merged with a conceptual design context in many ways serve as precedents to many of the social VR platforms of today. These platforms constitute humanoid avatars for telepresent human participants in a virtual environment, and automated non-physical actors in the form of simulations and interfaces to enhance and streamline communication. Beaux Arts Ball 4.0 envisions and plans for near-future cyberphysical social environments where the participants are not limited to humans that are physically present in a particular space, but constitute robots, artificially intelligent beings in the form of sounds and simulations, digital and/or robotic avatars of other telepresent humans, and sensor-enhanced smart AI environments that are responsive and actively engaged with the social life of their context. A real-time interactive hybrid digital and physical environment will be designed, realized and experienced using the tools and techniques of mixed-reality, cyber-physical systems, telepresence and automation. The seminar will culminate in an architecturally augmented robotic performance. An observer’s position and point of view will be tracked in real-time to reveal the augmented environment, complete with avatars of telepresent participants, and digitally augmented physical robots. The digital avatar and augmented KUKA Agilus robots are actors in the synthetic scene, they interact with each other based on the participant’s input and distinct behavioral patterns through machine learning. The seminar explores how to bridge the physical and digital world with an ecosystem of sensors in a spatial context, expanding upon current forms of mixed-reality experience. We investigate the representation of the self through avatars for multiple telepresent human participants and physical achines. Students will work in teams to create one scene/environment per team, and one avatar for each user/participant.