Robots in the theatre and different media

Introduction:
Robots frequently feature in the movies and occasionally in the theatre. Their presence in the media is of major importance on how users interact with them. Due to the scarcity of robots in everyday life, most of the users’ expectations and interpretations about robots stem from the media.
  Robots have triggered the imaginations of writers and directors for many years. Robots have been featured in all types of artistic expressions, such as books, movies, theatre plays and computer games. The importance of the media in forming our understanding of the world cannot be underestimated, in particular in situations in which access to real experience is limited. We are at an interesting point in time where on the one hand more and more robots enter our everyday lives, but on the other hand, almost all our knowledge about robots stems from the media. This tension between the expectations fuelled from SciFi and the actual abilities of the robots can result in negative experiences. It is therefore important for us to know about how the media has portrayed robots.


We would like to focus on robots being used in the theatre since they better represent the current state of robotics. Computer graphics can nowadays visualize almost anything and hence depiction of robots in movies can be more fantastic. Movies can show us robots that use anti gravity to float around, but there is little use for such a vision for the actual future of robotics. Robots that have to work on stage are constrained to the current state of the art in robotics and are therefore closer to what robots will be like in the close future. While this form of real-time acting introduces a healthy dose of reality, it also constrains the distribution of the performance. The audience needs to be present in the theatre to experience a play. This temporal and physical constraint of the performance limits the number of people able to see the show.
Movies, on the other hand, can be distributed on disks or through the internet and can be viewed at home at any desired moment. Theatre plays are, as a matter of fact, often video-recorded to document the event and to make the play available for review, discussion and debate. We believe that although the theatre is the preferred source for our study, we need to expand it to include movies and other media since far more people will have seen a movie with a robot than a theatre play with one. In the field of HRI, there has also been a long discussion on whether video recordings of robots can be used as a replacement for live human-robot interaction.

HRI as theatre: The research field of human-robot interaction (HRI) investigates how humans and robots interact with each other. This multidisciplinary field includes three large sub fields. Firstly, it includes the developments of robotic technology that are targeted to be useful for the interaction. Secondly, it includes a creative field in which daring new ideas are explored and artistic installations are developed. Lastly, it includes studies that are targeted at understanding human reaction towards robots. For this purpose, experiments are conducted in which robots act in front of human users, as not all actions of a robot can be produced as a result of computations. Due to the limitations of artificial intelligence, researchers often have to fall back on the Wizard-of-Oz method. In this method, an experimenter observes the interaction from a hidden location and remotely controls the robot accordingly. This is a mild form of deception, since it allows the robot to appear more intelligent than it really is. More elaborate deceptions are occasionally necessary to test certain aspects of HRI, such as the study of embarrassment  or of the users’ hesitation to kill a robot. Experiments with users in the field of HRI have the character of theatre plays, if not busking. The actions of the robots often follow scripts and occasionally the robots are even able to improvise based on their autonomous decisions. The users play the role of an involuntary actor that is called up onto the stage from the audience, similar to what is practised in busker festivals or comedy shows. While the busker (aka robot) has some understanding of the structure and goal of the act, the users are not always fully informed about what they may do or not do. They mainly try to comply with the expectations of the experimenter outlined in the description of the experiment. But even such descriptions can be intentionally misleading to achieve a certain deception. The users then have to fall back on their own experiences and ideas of robotics, which are based on the depiction of robots in the media. What we experience in laboratory experiments today is what future users will experience at home when interacting with their home robots.