Examples of Experiencing Other-ness
BL: One example is video telepresence -- remote telepresence -- which already
sort of does that. Like some of the early work of Scott Fisher at NASA Ames:
large, remote robotic arms, twenty times stronger than your own and maybe
twenty times as large as your body. (It's such a boy thing!...) You can
be this large powerful entity for real. One of the issues there was that
people would swing this arm around and break things because they didn't
have a notion of how large it was, compared to their own body. That's kind
of a primitive example of remote telepresence.
Another very exciting application is journalism, with remote telepresence
from places like war zones, where now you have a person holding a microphone
in front of a camera. In terms of doing anything more sensitive, if you
could identify with someone in the streets of Israel during a confrontation...
but social content that's generated, as opposed to a by-product of remote
presence, is a much harder problem. In literature an author can say selectively
what a character does and feels, through a stream-of-consciousness narration.
(continued...)
