Actors, Avatars and Agents: Potentials and Implications of Natural Face Technology for the Creation of Realistic Visual Presence

We are on the cusp of creating realistic, interactive, fully rendered human faces on computers that transcend the “uncanny valley,” widely known for capturing the phenomenon of “eeriness” in faces that are almost, but not fully realistic. Because humans are hardwired to respond to faces in uniquely positive ways, artificial realistic faces hold great promise for advancing human interaction with machines. For example, realistic avatars will enable presentation of human actors in virtual collaboration settings with new levels of realism; artificial natural faces will allow the embodiment of cognitive agents, such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri, putting us on a path to create “artificial human” entities in the near future. In this conceptual paper, we introduce natural face technology (NFT) and its potential for creating realistic visual presence (RVP), a sensation of presence in interaction with a digital actor, as if present with another human. We contribute a forward-looking research agenda to information systems (IS) research, comprising terminology, early conceptual work, concrete ideas for research projects, and a broad range of research questions for engaging with this emerging, transformative technology as it becomes available for application. By doing so, we respond to calls for “blue ocean research” that explores unchartered territory and makes a novel technology accessible to IS early in its application. We outline promising areas of application and foreshadow philosophical, ethical, and conceptual questions for IS research pertaining to the more speculative phenomena of “living with artificial humans.

To Affinity and Beyond: Interactive Digital Humans as a Human Computer Interface

The field of human computer interaction is increasingly exploring the use of more natural, human-like user interfaces to build intelligent agents to aid in everyday life. This is coupled with a move to people using ever more realistic avatars to represent themselves in their digital lives. As the ability to produce emotionally engaging digital human representations is only just now becoming technically possible, there is little research into how to approach such tasks. This is due to both technical complexity and operational implementation cost. This is now changing as we are at a nexus point with new approaches, faster graphics processing and enabling new technologies in machine learning and computer vision becoming available. I articulate the issues required for such digital humans to be considered successfully located on the other side of the phenomenon known as the Uncanny Valley. My results show that a complex mix of perceived and contextual aspects affect the sense making on digital humans and highlights previously undocumented effects of interactivity on the affinity. Users are willing to accept digital humans as a new form of user interface and they react to them emotionally in previously unanticipated ways. My research shows that it is possible to build an effective interactive digital human that crosses the Uncanny Valley. I directly explore what is required to build a visually realistic digital human as a primary research question and I explore if such a realistic face provides sufficient benefit to justify the challenges involved in building it. I conducted a Delphi study to inform the research approaches and then produced a complex digital human character based on these insights. This interactive and realistic digital human avatar represents a major technical undertaking involving multiple teams around the world. Finally, I explored a framework for examining the ethical implications and signpost future research areas

ICS Materials. Towards a re-Interpretation of material qualities through interactive, connected, and smart materials.

The domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increased technological advancement, miniaturization and democratization. Materials are becoming connected, augmented, computational, interactive, active, responsive, and dynamic. These are ICS Materials, an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected and Smart. While labs around the world are experimenting with these new materials, there is the need to reflect on their potentials and impact on design. This paper is a first step in this direction: to interpret and describe the qualities of ICS materials, considering their experiential pattern, their expressive sensorial dimension, and their aesthetic of interaction. Through case studies, we analyse and classify these emerging ICS Materials and identified common characteristics, and challenges, e.g. the ability to change over time or their programmability by the designers and users. On that basis, we argue there is the need to reframe and redesign existing models to describe ICS materials, making their qualities emerge

Beyond Participatory Design for Service Robotics

The spread of technologies as Cloud and Distributed Computing, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine Learning techniques comes with highly disruptive innovation potential and consequent design imperatives. High connectivity of devices and machines is shaping not only sensing and monitoring capabilities, but also describing ever more ubiquitous and diffuse computing capabilities, affecting decision-making with a wide range of assisting tools and methods. With the scaling potential of moving beyond its contemporary application such as industrial facilities monitoring, precision farming and agriculture, healthcare and risk management scenarios, RaaS is bound to involve an increasingly fluid and diverse range of users, shaping new socio-technical systems where practices, habits and relationships will evolve in respect to its adoption. On these premises, applied research at Polytechnic Interdepartmental Centre for Service Robotics in Turin, Italy, focuses on the development of a service robotics platform able to operate on the local scale and capable of adapting to evolving scenarios

Harvested and Grown: the rise of a new bio-materiality

Keynote abstract: We are in the midst of a transition from the industrial revolution to a biological revolution and this will have a great impact on what and how we design in the future. Not only we can acknowledge the advantage of biological systems in terms of zero waste, minimum use of energy and materials, but with synthetic biology, we can now ‘biofabricate’ like Nature does. Leather grown in a lab, yeast reprogrammed to produce silk, bacteria that grow a shoe, are but a few examples of current biotechnological breakthroughs. This keynote will map out the current landscape of biodesign and examine the rise of this new bio-materiality and its implication on design research. From botanical experiments to synthetic biology propositions, this paper will present a series of design case studies that question the notion of ‘knowledge making’ in the context of working with living systems. What becomes of the design process when working with living materials? If we can turn a yeast into a living factory, what language will designers need to learn? Could the intersection of design and biology lead to novel sustainable fabrication processes? What are the ethical implications of biofabrication

Humanoid Robots

For many years, the human being has been trying, in all ways, to recreate the complex mechanisms that form the human body. Such task is extremely complicated and the results are not totally satisfactory. However, with increasing technological advances based on theoretical and experimental researches, man gets, in a way, to copy or to imitate some systems of the human body. These researches not only intended to create humanoid robots, great part of them constituting autonomous systems, but also, in some way, to offer a higher knowledge of the systems that form the human body, objectifying possible applications in the technology of rehabilitation of human beings, gathering in a whole studies related not only to Robotics, but also to Biomechanics, Biomimmetics, Cybernetics, among other areas. This book presents a series of researches inspired by this ideal, carried through by various researchers worldwide, looking for to analyze and to discuss diverse subjects related to humanoid robots. The presented contributions explore aspects about robotic hands, learning, language, vision and locomotion