The floating head experiment

On October 26th 2010, a unique HRI-artistic public experiment took place at the UsineC theater, in Montreal. It was the result of a many-months collaboration between the Montreal based lab hosting the [ VOILES | SAILS ] research-creation platform (Self-Assembling Intelligent Ligther-thanair Structures) and the well-known Australian artist Stelarc and his team, who work on artificial agents´ embodiment and robotic behaviour modeling. The [ VOILES | SAILS ] project, consisting in the development of flying autonomous robots of geometrical shape, was born from architect and artist Nicolas Reeves´ will to evoke the age-old myth of an architecture freed from the law of gravity. These aerobots are meant to be use in artistic installations or performances. An aerobot was combined to Stelarc´s artwork named ”The Prosthetic Head”, which consists in the 5-meters-high projection of a 3D avatar linked to a chatbot-like discussion engine in order to interact with the visitors. Stelarc´s artworks development is supported by different universities labs, among which the MARCS Auditory Laboratory in the University of Western Sydney plays a major role. Its team has transposed this artwork into ”The Articulated Head”, a new version that is embodied via a LCD screen attached at the end of a 6-DoF industrial robotic arm. Thanks to various sensing devices (stereo-camera for people tracking, sound location, proprioception, proximity sensors...), they managed to develop an attention model to control the robot´s behaviour. This model, called THAMBS (Thinking Head Attention Model and Behavioral System), adopted a modular approach which allows its adaptation to different sensing abilities and to future robot embodiments. Through intensive international collaboration between Stelarc, the THAMBS and the [ VOILES | SAILS ] teams, we managed to realize a performance during which Stelarc´s synthetic head was projected onto a large floating cube, whose movement- and displacements in the air conveyed the head´s emotions and impressions to the audience. This ambitious collaboration between the two research programs for the creation of a unique new embodiment of ”The Prosthetic Head” led to relevant observations that will be the object of a future paper.