Yesterday I looked through the eyes of a robot.
It was a NAO robot fitted with a 3D printed set of goggles, so that the robot has two real cameras on its head (the ‘eyes’ of the NAO robot are not fact cameras). I was in another room wearing an Oculus Rift headset. The Oculus was hooked up to the NAO’s goggle cameras, so that I could see – in 3D – through those cameras.
But it was even better than that. The head positioning system of the Oculus headset was also hooked up to the robot, so I could turn my head left, and – in sync – the robot’s head moved. And I was standing in front of a Microsoft Kinect that was tracking my arm movements. Those movements were being sent to the NAO, so by moving my arms I was also moving the robot’s arms.
All together this made for a pretty compelling immersive experience. I was able look down while moving my (robot) arms and see them pretty much where you would expect to see your own arms. The illusion was further strengthened when Peter placed a mirror in front of the NAO robot, so I could see my (robot) self moving in the mirror. Then it got weird. Peter asked me to open my hand and placed a paper cup into it. I instinctively looked down and was momentarily shocked not to see the cup in my hand. That made me realise how quickly I was adjusting to the new robot me – within a couple of minutes of donning the headset.
This setup, developed here in the BRL by my colleagues Paul Bremner and Pete Gibbons, is part of a large EPSRC project called Being There. Paul and Peter are investigating the very interesting question of how humans interact with and via tele-operated robots, in shared social spaces.
Here is a YouTube video of an earlier version of this setup, without the goggles or Kinect:
I didn’t get the feeling of what it is like to be a robot, but it’s a step in that direction.