What it feels like being an iPad on a stick on wheels (2013)

Had one of these at our office. I used it as a remote worker on a team across the country. Few things - the author's wish list is out of date. Mine I could drive into a dock and it would charge the whole thing and the iPad. The device is great, and did improve my telepresence significantly.

That said, the problem was consistently that the double robotics website you must run it through was consistently either down or had such poor bandwidth I couldn't use it. I wish I could take everything about this device, and host it in the office. It got to be near unusable most of the time, and we just switched back to webex. Expensive experiment.

I wonder if it would give more 'presence' by using it from within VR and a stereoscopic 360 cam. You would need a way for the double to present in what direction you are looking at, so perhaps make a cylindrical screen (not sure if these exist) or a led line with one or two 'eyes' like Kit or a Cylon. This would solve the problem of the uncanny valley. We have the capability to do this, but all people can come up with is an uninspired ipad on wheels.

I think this sort of works if the operator is familiar with the surroundings, but even then, I can see this being rather annoying for others physically present in the area... Also, I'm not sure what problem this is specifically solving. If the idea is to give you your own point of view, then toy like controls probably won't cut it. They should really look to provide an interface with an AR headset of some kind.

My biggest peeve with one of these were the audio properties. The frequency response on the speaker is in the high notes, and the audio codec tends to have artifacts in the high frequencies. Combine these two and you get a shrill very far carrying sound; as a result whenever someone in our company was using it it disturbed a vastly larger radius of people than a face-to-face conversation would have.

It would be really interesting to read more about the physical participants' impressions of this. Having a screen on a stick with a live human face on it follow you around must be quite the uncanny valley.