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 movements 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.