Today on the first day of the SIGCHI conference, I was watching a session on virtual reality interfaces. But I wasn’t exactly there in person. The room was full, so a number of us were sitting on the floor in the hallway just outside the room, watching the talk on a monitor.
Every once in a while people would walk by, but it wasn’t a problem, because they generally walked really fast. But then something odd happened.
This year at SIGCHI, there are a number of people who are present only via telepresence robot. They are actually somewhere else in the world, and we see them as wheeled robots wandering about the conference, their face appearing as a disembodied image on an LCD screen.
At some point in the talk, one of those critters rolled by. And here’s the thing: They move really slowly. So all of a sudden we couldn’t see our virtual view of the live talk because, in physical reality, our sight line was blocked by the physical manifestaton of a person who was only virtually present.
We all waited patiently for the telepresent person to cross the screen, some of us smiling at the absurdity of it all. Afterward I leaned to the guy sitting next to me and said “That was a very postmodern moment.”