Computer screens that shrug or laugh when you do

Imagine you're on a Skype video call and the person you're chatting to laughs. As their shoulders shake with mirth at your wholly exceptional gags, your monitor gently jiggles up and down to reinforce the hilarity. Then, when they come closer to the camera, the screen moves closer to you on a robot arm - again, aping your interlocutor's action. When they tilt their head questioningly at you, the monitor does likewise.

That's the latest idea from a team at Stanford University in California: motorised flat-screen monitors that mimic the motion of a person on screen.

It looks fun, but does it help? To find out, David Sirkin and Wendy Ju at Stanford's Center for Design Research added motors to the anglepoise-style arm of an Apple iMac G4 - the famous "screen-on-a-stick" model - to make it robotically controllable. Then they linked that system to software that could make the screen undertake nine motions in response to a person's movements, such as nods for "yes" and sideways shakes for "no", when controlled by a Wii games controller. In addition, a slim robot arm was added to produce extra effects - such as knocking on a table to gain attention.

At last month's Human Robot Interaction conference in Boston, the team revealed that volunteers found the idea beneficial. With the proxy motion switched on, people were perceived to be "more friendly, less dominant and more involved" in conversations.  "Consistency between physical and on-screen action improved understanding of the messages that remote participants communicated," said the researchers.

The robot arm that can tap on the table (see the video) to get attention came out of earlier work in which the team found that "people respond more strongly to a physical robotic arm, waving at them from nearby, than they do to a video version of the same arm," says Sirkin. "An attention-grabbing noise on its own could work, but without accompanying physical movement, it wouldn't likely have the same impact on people."

In particular, they conclude that the robotically-actuated screen technology might improve the lot of people who telework - mainly interacting with colleagues on screen. For such people, perhaps, robotically enhanced computers might be worth the extra money. In addition, Sirkin thinks "whole-body telepresence robots" - which basically have flatscreen monitors in the place of a head with a person's face displayed on it - could be made more expressive using their insights.