minos gave a seminar on his engineering efforts for robot stand-up, we back-and-forthed on the wider framing of the work, and a bit of that is published here. his write-up.
workshop paper presented at humanoid robots and creativity, a workshop at humanoids 2014.
diary | 18 nov 2014 | tagged: comedy lab · phd · qmat · research
with the visualiser established, it was trivial to attach the free view camera to the head pose node and boom!: first-person perspective. to be able to see through the eyes of anyone present is such a big thing.
diary | 13 jan 2015 | tagged: comedy lab · performer–audience dynamics · phd · qmat · research
need a hit-test for people orienting to others. akin to gaze, but the interest here is what it looks like you’re attending to. but what should that hit-test be? visualisation and parameter tweaking to the rescue…
diary | 03 feb 2015 | tagged: comedy lab · performer–audience dynamics · phd · qmat · research
the robot stand-up work got a proper write-up. well, part of it got a proper write-up, but so it goes.
This paper demonstrates how humanoid robots can be used to probe the complex social signals that contribute to the experience of live performance. Using qualitative, ethnographic work as a starting point we can generate specific hypotheses about the use of social signals in performance and use a robot to operationalize and test them. […] Moreover, this paper provides insight into the nature of live performance. We showed that audiences have to be treated as heterogeneous, with individual responses differentiated in part by the interaction they are having with the performer. Equally, performances should be further understood in terms of these interactions. Successful performance manages the dynamics of these interactions to the performer’s- and audiences’-benefit.
diary | 25 aug 2015 | tagged: comedy lab · phd · qmat · research
‘visualising performer–audience dynamics’ spoken paper accepted at ISPS 2017, the international symposium on performance science. this is doubly good, as i’ve long been keen to visit reykjavík and explore iceland.
diary | 13 apr 2017 | tagged: comedy lab · performer–audience dynamics · phd · qmat · research
had a lot of fun with my talk ‘visualising performer–audience dynamics’ at ISPS 2017. with a title like that, some play with the ‘spoken paper’ format had to be had.
pleasingly, people were coming up to me to say how much they enjoyed it for the rest of the conference. huzzah!
i recorded it, and have stitched it together with the slides. the video is here, on the project page.
diary | 01 sep 2017 | tagged: comedy lab · performer–audience dynamics · phd · qmat · research · iceland · talk
an email comes in from a performance studies phd candidate asking if they could watch the whole robot routine from comedy lab: human vs. robot. damn right. i’d love to see someone write about that performance as a performance.
but, better than that staging and its weird audiences (given the advertised title, robo-fetishists and journalists?) there is comedy lab #4: on tour, unannounced. the premise: robot stand-up, to unsuspecting audiences, at established comedy nights. that came a year later with the opportunity to use another robothespian (thanks oxford brookes!). it addressed the ecological validity issues, and should simply be more fun to watch.
for on tour, unannounced we kept the performance the same – or rather, each performance used the same audience responsive system to tailor the delivery in realtime. there’s a surprising paucity in the literature about how audiences respond differently to the same production; the idea was this should be interesting data. so i’ve taken the opportunity to extract from the data set the camera footage of the stage from each night of the tour. and now that is public, at the links below.
the alternative comedy memorial society
gits and shiggles
angel comedy
the robot comedy lab experiments form chapter 4 of my phd thesis ‘liveness: an interactional account’
Four: Experimenting with performance
The literature reviewed in chapter three also motivates an experimental programme. Chapter four presents the first, establishing Comedy Lab. A live performance experiment is staged that tests audience responses to a robot performer’s gaze and gesture. This chapter provides the first direct evidence of individual performer–audience dynamics within an audience, and establishes the viability of live performance experiments.
there are currently two published papers –
robot stand-up: engineering a comic performance
http://tobyz.net/diary/2014/11/robot-standup-workshop-paper
robot comedy lab: experimenting with the dynamics of live performance
http://tobyz.net/diary/2015/08/robot-standup-journal-paper
and finally, on ‘there is a surprising paucity…’, i’d recommend starting with gardair’s mention of mervant-roux.
diary | 03 may 2019 | tagged: comedy lab · phd · qmat · research
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