A Freaky Idea for Remote-Controlled Sightseeing With Human Avatars

BY KYLE VANHEMER

Think of all the ways you can now experience Barcelona from your couch. You can read about it at length on Wikipedia and peruse snapshots of the Sagrada Familia on Flickr. You can order delivery from the tapas place down the street and enjoy your meal while watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona on demand.

About the only thing you can’t do is have the embodied experience of actually walking through the city, deciding which streets to explore, which performer to listen to, which bar to duck into. If a handful of Spaniards has their way, though, you’ll soon be doing all that from your couch, too.

Omnipresenz is your chance to “explore the world with a human avatar.” The project, under development by researchers in Spain, works much as you’d expect. Someone in a distant city wears a helmet with a GoPro and an internet connection.You, at your computer, use a proprietary interface to dictate where they go and what they do in real time. Their eyes, their ears and, most importantly, their agency become yours.

A Social Agenda Beyond Sci-Fi

Daniel Gonzalez Franco, one of the researchers behind the effort, says the idea started as an art project. It was inspired in part by works like Paul Sermon’sTelematic Dreaming, which used cameras and projectors to let people in remote beds sleep alongside virtual versions of each other. Previously, Franco was part of a group that experimented with the Oculus Rift’s capacity for body-swapping weirdness.

As Omnipresenz developed, Franco became convinced teleguided tourism is a genuinely good idea, and he’s seeking funding to continue the work. The big draw, the thing you can’t get with Wikipedia, is human empathy. “Although Omnipresenz may sound like a crazy idea, I believe that it can be used for positive behaviors among geographically and culturally distant humans,” he says.

Franco and his team hope to tailor the Omnipresenz software to encourage this sort of positive exchange. One idea he’s exploring is a dynamic crowdfunding system that would let people do good in real ways, in real time. Say, for example, seeing a homeless man and buying him lunch through your avatar. Beyond providing a new platform with which to experience the world and do social good, Franco sees therapeutic applications for the technology, perhaps letting people with agoraphobia visit places they’d typically avoid.

Despite the good intentions, however, there’s something unsettling about Omnipresenz. Aside from the fact that, as we’ve seen with Google Glass, people aren’t entirely eager to interact with strangers who have cameras strapped to their faces, there’s a lingering creepiness in the idea of paying money to inhabit and control another person. We have an entire subgenre of dystopian sci-fi dedicated to this sort of bodily subjugation. Most recently, Spike Jonze’s Her showed us a future in which some humans served as meat-puppet sex surrogates for super-smart artificial intelligence systems. It didn’t seem like a great gig.

Still, it’s worth examining the creepiness-factor here more closely. So many of today’s technologies—those that serve up on-demand facts, films, rides and meals—are about bringing the world to us. Isn’t this a logical place for that trajectory to land? Today, I can pay you for a ride in your car, or to come over and set up my new Ikea furniture. Is paying you to walk around some city in Europe terribly different?

It certainly feels different. Sharing your car or your apartment or even your time is one thing. Selling your agency to someone seems to be another. Omnipresenz, if it ever becomes a real thing, may indeed facilitate all sorts of enriching human encounters. But the basic concept forces us to confront one of the central ugly truths of our current technological moment: So much of the delightful convenience we enjoy today is exacted in the form of inconvenience from others. Maybe that’s ultimately why Omnipresenz is so unsettling—because remote controlling a stranger’s embodied experience from our couch really does seem like some sort of inevitable end point.

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/guys-want-build-avatar-real-life/