People
“I don’t want to be seen kissing a Nazi helmet!” offers Associate Professor Adrian David Cheok, as he holds the “Lovotics” robot. While it bears a clear resemblance to said military gear, it could very well be an early ancestor of R2D2, beeping and booping while rolling around the ground. And, more than that, it is actually able to remember facial and vocal cues, seek and give affection and, ultimately, forge relationships with humans. (Though not necessarily technosexual ones.)
That’s the kind of work that routinely goes on at the National University of Singapore’s Mixed Reality Lab (MXR) – a brain-busting blend of computing, psychology, engineering, neuroscience, sociology, and Hollywood-inspired gadget-making. The “Lovotics” robot may sound cute, but that isn’t how these researchers hailing from NUS and Keio University in Japan understand it. Cute has a different meaning when it comes to the Keio-NUS CUTE Centre that the MXR is part of. It stands for Connective Ubiquitous Technology for Embodiments. Here, they look at inventions that tap into new media technologies to help people connect and communicate with each other, with a focus on the family unit.
It is mind-boggling, but Cheok, who spearheads the Lab as its director, can surely deal with it. His tweets suggest he is a bona fide nerd: “HOT AR NEWS: The Qualcomm AR SDK does 30FPS Natural Feature Tracking on Android. iOS version coming soon!”, and “Looks very useful for AR! COLLADA royalty-free XML schema enables digital asset exchange within interactive 3D industry”. Right.
Thankfully, his acronymic tweets are not a reflection of his real-life speech. Here, we speak with the man who straddles realities.
Lucas Ho: Let’s start at the beginning, your beginning.
Adrian Cheok: I was born in Adelaide. I come from a mixed background. My father is Malaysian and my mother is Greek. They met in university in Adelaide. When I finished my studies, my real first job was at Mitsubishi Electric’s research lab in Osaka. After Japan I came here.
So you’re not actually Japanese?
(Laughs) People often ask, are you Japanese or partly Japanese? Though no one in Japan would think I’m Japanese. Because I’ve spent a lot of time in Japan, I’m a lot more polite than I was. I find myself bowing like Japanese people do, but even when talking on the phone! It's subconscious.
There’s a fascinating relation to your work right there, where you try to convey human emotions across space with technology. And here, people are trying to express deference over the phone with a physical action, as if a bow could be heard.
Yes. I was a bit of a mad scientist. When I was younger, I used to enjoy taking things apart. I’d get a new watch and take it apart, to see what was inside.
Could you put it back together?
No, which got my mother very angry! But it was good training. Making things and taking things apart – that’s hacking, but in a good sense. I also had a fascination with computers. My generation was the first to play computer games. My friend’s father bought an Apple II. It came with full electronic schematics and assembly language manuals. It’s strange now, because today Apple is such a secretive company. So we would make our own programs in assembly, and it was very fun. Adults had absolutely no idea what we were doing.
When I was younger, I was also interested in storytelling. My group of friends and I would write scripts, and make five-minute movies on 8mm film. That’s how I became interested in digital media and mixed reality.
What’s the wackiest thing you’ve done, either as a child or an inventor?
It’s probably got to be this touch communication system I made which was centered around chickens. When I was a kid, my grandfather had chickens in his backyard that I enjoyed playing with. So I wanted to make a pet communicator. It was called “Poultry Internet”, where you could hug the chicken over the Internet!
So, what exactly is mixed reality?
Initially, it started off with putting a virtual object in reality. It was very much about the visuals. Now it’s about all the different senses, and how we augment each of them. One thing we are looking at is digitally changing the taste on your tongue, without you tasting anything. It’s almost impossible to accurately understand the taste of the wine if you’re just reading the label. Taste is analog, it’s all chemicals, and you can’t send chemicals over the Internet. So if you could have a kind of electric lollipop to actuate the taste buds on your tongue, you can capture and send tastes. And you can communicate your emotion as well; you can either send a sweet taste or a bitter taste.
We’re going back to Descartes’ mind-body duality.
I think we realise now that it’s all one system. Our thinking and communication is very much related to all of the senses. The brain is completely networked with the other parts of your body. Things we didn’t think were communication before are now. For example, when you meet someone, the normal thing to do is to eat together. If you think about it, the logic of that doesn’t make sense, because you can easily get the nutrition by yourself! But in the process of eating together, you’re sharing some tastes and smells, and that is a kind of communication.
I think the question now is: what is the future of communication? We’ve been completely immersed in media and have infinite information. Still, we find it difficult to get to know each other only via the Internet. If we’re going to communicate through the Internet, we have to make totally new forms of communication, which would involve the senses that extend all of your body and brain into the world.
Then that’s different from The Matrix films, where it’s all electrical stimulation and there’s no relation to your physical body.
Direct brain stimulation is theoretically possible, but it isn’t worth the resources. And I think it’s not simply stimulation that people are after. They will eventually want to connect their brains together.
You mean like with USB bioports in Avatar? Wouldn’t that be scary? There would be no secrets.
It could be. If the husband says no to connecting to his wife, it means he’s got things to hide from her. So that means you will have to use such a system, or else people have reason not to trust you. It will become default.
Then there wouldn’t be a need for art or poetry. Because, those are perfectly imperfect forms of communication, to convey complex emotions or thoughts that words can’t. If someone could come into my brain and consciousness, I wouldn’t need to paint or write a poem anymore, or even speak.
People will find new ways to be creative. If I were to put a video camera in my grandmother’s house and watch everything that she does, it would be terribly boring! So there’s still a need for storytelling. It’s like making a sculpture – you start off with a huge block of marble and you cut away at it, and what remains is beautiful and more interesting. People will still write poetry and still read novels, and still make movies. People have been predicting the death of cinema, but that hasn’t happened. New media doesn’t necessarily replace old media, it just adds new layers to them.
For example, the Land Transport Authority had a Circle Line art competition for the upcoming Kent Ridge Station. We made an artificial intelligence poetry generator, which allows people waiting for the train to send a message to it, which it will then convert into poetry.
The motivation for this project was that years ago, people used to write poems to each other. Now the younger generation doesn’t write poetry. But we have the new medium of chat, like Twitter, which young people enjoy, so why not convert that into the traditional medium of poetry? It’s cultural communication through technology. A Korean version of the poetry generator will be shown in July, at the Nabi Arts Centre in Korea.
So your work is about making connections and coming closer to perfect forms of communication, so to speak. Some believe the purest form of communication between humans is sex. Might we one day just need to put on the right gear and have actual virtual sex with our partner miles away?
I’m pretty sure that’s not so difficult at all. Someone told me that if you want to discover the latest developments in robotics, you should check out the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas. But even if the technology is available, it won’t be the same as the real thing. There’re a lot of very subtle things involved – temperature, smell, taste. The technology will be there, and there will be people who will want such technology, but it won’t be the norm.
We should be helping children communicate better with their parents, or families communicate with each other. It would have a much wider impact on society. We have limited time and limited resources; it’s a matter of choosing what is most important to deal with.
Personally, I would like to work on new kinds of very fast transport. There are very few things in humanity that go backwards, but one of them is air travel. Speed of travel hasn’t been increasing exponentially, the way other forms of technology have. I can’t fly to Tokyo in an hour. We had the Concorde, but that went out of service. So perhaps I’d like to work a personal teleportation machine.
The next stage, then, is to think about how we can also create a network of our physical world, to interface physical media directly with our bodies. That’s the next stage of media, I think. Computers will directly connect – not with the brain – but with various parts of our body. We’ll be like little robots. 
Words Lucas Ho
Images Thomas Tan
