David V. Lu and William D. Smart. Polonius: A Wizard of Oz Interface for HRI Experiments. In Proceeding of the 6th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction, HRI ’11, New York, NY, USA, 2011. ACM.

Late-Breaking Report (Poster Paper)

[abstract] – [poster] – [bibtex]

@inproceedings{lu2011polonius,
  author = {Lu, David V. and Smart, William D.},
  title = {Polonius: A Wizard of Oz Interface for HRI Experiments},
  booktitle = {Proceeding of the 6th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction},
  series = {HRI '11},
  year = {2011},
  isbn = {978-1-4503-0561-7},
  location = {Lausanne, Switzerland},
  numpages = {2},
  publisher = {ACM},
  address = {New York, NY, USA}
}

The Gemenoid F, a newest model of the realistic looking android by Hiroshi Ishiguro, has taken to the stage recently in a new play in Japan. The play, called “Sayonara” or “Goodbye” in English, is about a girl with a fatal illness. Her parents buy her a robot companion and then abandon her with it. Further details about the plot are a bit sketchy. Without more details, I don’t feel too comfortable saying whether the use of the android was justified.

However, what I will comment on is whether the android was ready for this job. The android was controlled by an operator backstage whose motions were translated into robot actions. Her voice was also used in the robot. However, the robot doesn’t perform actions the way a human would. Watching the video below, the robot’s motions seem very robotic, that is to say, jerky and sudden.

My question continues to be, what takes this beyond novelty? Is it enough to just put a robot in a play? Or should there, as I would maintain, be some sort of actual scientific contribution, some novel algorithm, that makes putting a robot on stage more than a normal interaction with the robot except the other person’s lines are known beforehand?

I’ve included Ishiguro’s work as a citation in a couple papers now, but I always end up citing news articles about the play, nothing originating from Ishiguro himself, because he doesn’t have any papers out on the theatre work he’s done. The cynical part of me, looking for a reason why he does these plays, turns to the something said by the director of this play, and their previous collaboration, Oriza Hirata.

“Hirata said androids are not only good actors but also great for boosting ticket sales. About 600 people were expected to watch the play over a two-day Tokyo run.”

Image from opera.media.mit.edu

There’s a fascinating new production that just opened last month of Death and the Powers, that uses all sorts of technology in the story and in the production. The story surrounds a rich, successful older man who starts to fear his mortality, and thus decides to upload his consciousness into The System, which takes the form of everything on stage, include big video displays, a robotic chandelier and robotic furniture. Plus, there’s a chorus of robots called Operabots.

This does a lot of the things that I think robot theatre should do. It uses technology as not only an integral part of the production, but also as a key theme in the plot. At the same time that the characters on stage are considering the human relation to technology (the uploaded character) and how it relates to identity, the robots on stage are being controlled by aspects of the humans’ performance. I’m going to see if I can get tickets and head up to Chicago to see it in the spring.

Thanks to Auston Montville for the tip.

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