TELEPRESENCE ETIQUETTE

We posted about three different telepresence robots yesterday: the Anybots QB, the Willow Garage Texai, and the Vgo. Telepresence is great in concept, but as Erico Guizzo discussed a bit, it’s a strange combination of being somewhere and not being somewhere, and interactions with people are different in ways that range from subtle to drastic. Willow Garage has been using Texai in their office for quite a while; one of their employees, Dallas Goecker, ‘commutes’ daily from Indiana to California via Texai. So, they’ve been figuring out some of these social rules as they go, to the point where some things are now a part of the Texai communication software:

Here are a few built-in bits of etiquette:

Texai Rule #1: If you see me, I see you. Explanation: It’s about two-way communication. Implications: The cameras face forward because the screen faces forward. The pilots are only allowed to drive the Texai once they’ve shared their video stream.

Texai Rule #2: Texai do not record audio or video. Explanation: It’s about face-to-face communication.

More, after the jump.

These are some generalized social rules that apply to the Texai:

* When a pilot wants to get a local’s attention, they’ll hover by the office window or open doorway (initiating conversations). The extreme example of this is running into the doorway to “knock.”

* When working from outside of the building, WGers will often sit their Texai at their real office desks because that’s where other people know to go find them.

* When Dallas goes down the hallway, people often say hi to him; this has happened less so now that Texai is not a novelty, but it happens at about the same rates as when we say hi to each other in the building in person.

* Dallas will turn the Texai and camera just as he turns his body and eyes during meetings to show where he’s paying attention (non-verbal communication)

* Pilots like Jonathan Knowles and Sergey Brin at the X-Prize were navigating the cocktail and dinner rooms much like a person would navigate a party, slowing down when approaching groups of people talking and going a bit faster when going between groups (respecting personal space)

* Locals will push chairs around the table to make room for the Texai at meeting, which is much like pulling out a chair for someone to sit down at the table. Texai are actually able to push many types of chairs themselves, but it’s just a nice thing people do for Texai pilots.

* Just like cell phone etiquette, one of the top questions people ask when encountering a new person in a Texai is, “Where are you?”

Of course, this is not to say that all telepresence robots are the same, or that all of these points of social etiquette will apply to every environment. But it’s interesting to hear about what actions and interactions are natural when a person is sort of both there and not there (in terms of physical presence), since it’s a rather unnatural (and perhaps unprecedented?) state in which to exist. It’s funny, too, how people instinctively associate the person controlling the robot with the robot itself: it becomes entirely natural to address the Texai as “you” as opposed to “your robot” or something like that.

I haven’t interacted with anyone through a QB or Vgo, but I would imagine that it would be significantly more difficult to identify a person as one of these robots due to the lack of a big screen with the pilot’s head displayed on it to allow for face to face identification and communication. And, this seems to be one of the things that make the Texai such effective telepresence tools: the ability for the pilots to be instinctively treated just like a person, in a robot.

Many thanks to Ken Conley and Leila Takayama of Willow Garage for talking to me about Texai.

[ Willow Garage Texai ]