Avatar Machine - Marc Owens' wearable simulator of virtual worlds.
Avatar Machine, by designer Marc Owens, is a wearable device that simulates the experience of third-person gaming environments. By wearing this costume and head-mounted camera with VR goggles, a user can view themselves as a sort of virtual character while moving around and interacting in the real world.
Owens created Avatar Machine to explore whether such a device would grant users "a diminished sense of social responsibility (...) and demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment." In other words, turn them into instant board trolls.
Owens, 26, is a design student at the Royal College of Art, and lives in East London. An earlier version of this experiment from Owens circulated around the web in 2007.
In part one of today's Boing Boing tv episode, we premiere an all-new experiment with Avatar Machine -- live beta testing conducted in 2008, in the Harajuku area of Tokyo. Here, the user (Owens) flirts with Harajuku hotties, then almost gets his ass kicked (for real!) by some Japanese gangster dudes.
In part two of today's show, Xeni speaks with Owens over a Skype video connection, live from his studio in East London.
HowStuffWorks has a step-by-step explanation of the device here. (special thanks to Susannah Breslin)
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Wow. Baudrillard and Bakhtin would love this.
I wouldn't exactly call those guys gangsters- they appear to be more like run-of-the-mill Harajuku rockabilly dudes. Japanese gangsters would be more likely to wear golf shirts and plaid trousers with white shoes. Still, it's kind of awesome that he almost got his ass kicked by Guitar Wolf.
What is he doing with his arms?
Those "punks" are such tools. People can be idiots.
Word to Marc Owens and other Western tools: either learn how to behave in Japan, or keep the fuck out of it. Jackassery like this just makes life all the more difficult for those of us who try to fit in here. Walking aggressively up to people, even if you're dressed discretely, is one of the biggest social mistakes you can make in Japan. If he got his ass kicked, he would totally deserve it. In fact, if he had done that to me, I would've kicked his ass myself.
Those guys aren't even remotely "gangster dudes". They are, as Boba Fett Diop mentioned, just a group of rockabilly revivalists; I see them hanging out in Yoyogi Koen all the time.
Man, this guy deserved what he got. They probably thought he was mocking them -- he was wandering around Yoyogi Park, where they dance for hours on Sundays. He goes up in a goofy suit, starts making weird dances, and won't leave them alone? Yeah, it's gonna annoy them.
That rockabilly club is pretty nice, overall, though. I'm sad to see them get treated like this, and hate to think people are going to see them as gangsters.
Here they are doing their normal thing:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=K7H9ZGmlWuY
kid stuff. Let's see the porn version.
Seems a tad disingenuous for him to claim that he wants to explore whether this rig would encourage "diminished sense of social responsibility (...) and demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment," considering that he's already entering the "experiment" with that expectation.
Now, suppose he were to outfit a random sampling of college freshmen with these outfits...
What a dumbass.
I think everyone is taking the wrong lesson from this. Owens shouldn't be less antagonistic; the antagonism ought to be incorporated into the game of which the suit is an avatar. Install sensors and have a damage meter in the display! Steal people's belongings and add them to the inventory! Get points for befuddlement of others and even more for kicking random strangers' asses! If you're going for complete alienation from the everyday real world, don't work in half measures; be the misanthrope you've always dreamed of being!
That all said, Owens did surrender to the stereotype that Japan, or at least Harajuku, is a land of whimsy and everyone would be delighted by his technologically-enhanced anime-style cosplay. I'd say a better test of his equilibrium and perspective on NPCs (non-player characters, donchukno) might be in a culturally-neutral area like Piccadilly Circus or Times Square; tourists have more tolerance for the odd than do insular natives of the turf he's invaded.
ZippySpinCycle @ 7: My thoughts exactly. "Wow, when I performed this experiment on myself I got exactly the results I was expecting!" Confirmation bias much?
Gee, there's a crowd of guys dressed like bikers! I'm sure they'll be delighted with me dancing around in a clown suit with them. Even though they're scowling and gesturing at me to go away. Hey! They're pushing me - they must want me to dance some more.
I'd respect Owens if he'd started bugging the fascists who dress up in paramilitary outfits and blare nationalist songs out of loudspeakers and rough up Koreans, but the rockabilly guys just wanted to be left alone.
When I grow up, I want to be an Angry Elvis gang member. It seemed to me that approaching those dudes exhibited the lack of common sense that often accompanies real talent. Just kidding.
But if anyone's interested in real research related to this, Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab is going at it (but not from a gaming perspective). I used to cloth the avatars... meaning they all wore Hawaiian shirts. There's also a lot avatar research at UC Santa Barbara, I think.
What exactly is what he sees?
All I want to say about this is: why the hell do we want to to go in Japan and do "tests"?
What's up with that?
Like they can do everything they want "somewhere" because they want to.
Bricology has mighty good points, I should say, about not pissing off people in Japan.