Challenges in Human Computer Interaction: Invisible Robots

If you have read my posts in this blog over the last few months, you might already be familiar with the idea that "not all robots look like robots". People like Don Norman (see my previous interview) and Frederic Kaplan (see his talk at Lift Asia 2008) have been advocating this for many years now; however, when they speak about robots, they often intentionally refer to that category of robots that populate (or will populate) our homes: these robots are called social robots, in contraposition to the already well establish domain of industrial robots. In this post, I take the liberty to speak about a third category of robots, which are not used to produce other goods or in home settings. I am not even sure I would call them robots at first, but they are undeniable physical, they move through actuators and serve humans intelligently for training and entraining purposes: I am talking about the animatronics, often used in amusement parks.

A few weeks ago I visited the Daegu Safety Theme Park, an amusement and educational park for children located in Daegu, South Korea. In 2003 Daegu was unfortunately the theater of one of the most tragic subway disasters of all times. A sequence of mistakes, a lot a of misfortune and inadequate emergency equipment turned the suicidal attempt of a dissatisfied arsonist into an unprecedented fire disaster that caused the death of about 200 people in one of the metropolitan subway stations of Daegu. After the disaster, the Korean government started a training program in schools to teach safety awareness to children and, as part of the program, the government also opened a Safety Theme Park in Daegu.

The park is absolutely brilliant and deserves a trip if you are in Daegu. In fact, more than a memorial park, the Safety Theme Park is a training camp for children and their parents, where they can learn about safety through direct experience. The park has the double objective to educate and entertain the audience, targeting in particular children, but it is undeniably instructive and fun for adults too. The audience doesn't really get in direct contact with robots or animatronics, but it experiences them indirectly as part of a plot of a staged experience.

It was memorable for example when we walked on a perfect reproduction of a subway carriage parked in a station and they set it on fire to simulate an accident (the fire was fake, but there was real smoke). After having shown us a video of the 2003 subway disaster and the remains of one of the carriages from the 2003 accident, a guide directed us to a functioning reproduction of a carriage, where we were told how to depressurize, unlock and open the emergency doors, how to protect our faces from the smoke and how to run in the underground tunnels (following a luminescent trail on the ground) to find an exit. Similarly, we also experienced a simulation of a 8 degree Richter scale earthquake: they put us on a platform on which there was a reproduction of the interior of a kitchen, with various appliances and furniture, and then they activated the platform that shook us for about 20 seconds in order to reproduce a real earthquake: they taught us what to do in such a case and our goal was to follow the directions we were given in the briefing. Finally they led us to a room reproducing a real forest during a flood and they taught us how to behave in such a situation.

Each one of the these simulations (and more that I did not describe here) made perfect use of animatronics and robots in order to simulate staged dangerous situations like a subway fire, an earthquake or a flood. Interestingly, these robots, like on a movie set, are completely invisible and have the only role to create the atmosphere and a realistic and immersive experience for the audience. Although 3D technology and virtual reality is often used to "drag" the audience in virtual and immersive worlds, I suspect that at times animatronics serve better the cause of simulating a real experience by dragging the audience not to a virtual world, but a real and physical world that looks as similar as possible to reality. Obviously the "robots which make the magic happen" (e.g., the platform of the earthquake, the fake subway wagon) are invisible or only partially visible to the audience, so that with a bit of imagination the audience can really pretend to be in the middle of a critical and dangerous situation.