Emoto Concept
A robotic system to give body and
expression to the AI on your phone
Collaborators
Lucas Ochoa
Gautam Bose
(First advised by Professor Dan Lockton)
Project Space
This was a speculative design fiction reimagining our relationships with our phones as one to an emotive AI. We implemented a mixed hardware and software platform to explore phone functionality as if it were AI driven first and able to take in more varied input (other sensors, not just touch screens) and have more nonconventional output (nonverbal communication through expressive motion). Currently funded by a research grant through Google's Creative Lab. The first live demo debuted at CMU's exhibition "Where are the Humans in AI?" (our answer: 'on their phones').
Emoto's Website
My Role
Concept storyboarder
Prototyper
Mobile/iOT Dev
1st concept video:
Human/AI interactions was the last theme from our junior second semester design studio. This is where we left off on Emoto.
See the medium blog for more detailed process documentation. This site is just a summary from my perspective
MY ROLE | Concept artist, and Interaction Protoyper
Tools:
Drawing
Lots of Keynote
Javascript
Shiftr
HTML/CSS
Lucas had helped me on a very similar technical project before, and Gautam was my co-author on a different paper so I was very excited to work with them again.
At the time I was fascinated with the social/interaction problems with IPA's, the polarized humanization/abstraction in the form of home assistants, the attention economy and rising efforts to control our addiction to mobile smartphones, and wow I could keep on going — but for this project I pushed the idea of it trying to reframe our relationship to phones, and expanding the nonverbal communication methods + expressiveness of an IPA through animated motion and coordinated hybrid digital-physical interactions.
The original studio project was only a few weeks, so there wasn't enough time to fully research, test and iterate on a comprehensive interaction system/platform, but a lot of my time was spent story boarding, drawing out forms (eyes and body), and coding the digital interface/iOT backend for Emoto to at least communicate the hybrid digital physical concept of an AI sidekick that comes to life from your phone.
Abridged Process
Whiteboard braindumping with Lucas
Warming up to animating with sensors
Hide it in the phone = Invisible mounting
Nexus: Cheap, light, but no browser caching...
Trying to generate joint angles for animation through a model rigged in Unity
Protractors stuck to joints = much easier/faster animation prototyping. Ended up going with a keyframe styled method...
Making sure WOZ sends to python reciever
Conner teaches me how to spray paint models properly
That vinyl title was a pain to put on
Plant stolen for setting mood in exhibition space.
Some messy innards. Servo hats for PI's and such.
Setting up for show above and below
Show time. Vinyl instructions and handy exhibition labels
Live sequence from someone's cellphone at the show
