Teleshadow (Shadow Lamp)
Shunpei Yasuda, a post-graduate student in Media Design at Japan’s Keio University has created Teleshadow, a piece of electronic furniture shaped like a lamp that mediates presence across a geographical distance by recording video and transforming it into what looks like puppets on a shoji or paper wall. In Japanese homes these walls protect the privacy of those in the room, but allow people to monitor the presence of those within.
Interestingly, the video feeds are loaded onto the system using smart cards, hence the video feeds are not live. It would be interesting how this affects the strength of social presence - the feeling that someone is there with you.
This is related to my work as I am dealing the effects of location-based visualisations on the feeling of connectedness and awareness between friends. This puppet visualisation is a playful way of visualising the status of someone, but if it wasn’t impossible, surely live feeds would be most interesting. This probably means having an electronic, flying, battery-less robot flying around taking shots of you like in third-person video games. Not for now, at least.
Source: BBC News
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