Tactics and Tools

BY LEVELS:

Level 0: basic technologies:

a) email, internet, phone

b) drop in to worksite occassionally to pick up / deliver / chat

Level 1: some basic teleworking-specific technology

a) Remote Desktop / Tunneling / VPN

b) video telepresence a) 1:1 skype etc b) m:m zoom.us / google_conversations

Level 2: advanced telepresence

a) Kinect + avatar in

i) virtual meeting rooms for short sessions

ii) trickle streaming all day

b) scanned and solved avatar

c) extra, with goals: feelings of inclusion, staying in the loop, spontaneous/casual/side conversations,

culture/project-pressure sharing, easier brainstorming

Level 3: telerobotics

a) dashboard controlled, IoT, semi-automated

b) dexterity-substituting robots controlled by abstract inputs

c) dexterity-emulating robots controlled by skeletal/hand tracking

BY TYPE OF WORK:

A. Knowledge Work:

Most are familiar with doing some work online, by logging in remotely, telephoning in, emailing, and skyping.

Here's a few unusual tools and tactics, to show we have lots of room left for innovation in tele-working.

Skype Alternatives

A problem with skyping a group meeting: hard to tell who someone is talking to, their head and eyes point directly straight ahead.

0 skype with panning

- everyone would wear or hold a gyro-tracked device, or desktop mouse, and that would be used to pan around a cylindrical arrangement of skype windows representing other participants.

- each skype window on your screen would be a rectangle that can rotate around a verticle axis

-- so you can see which way someone is looking, and if they are looking directly at you

1. 3D virtual presence

You have a 3D avatar representing you in a virtual world.

- This has been done before most notably with the game servers of Second Life, and openSimulation.

- virtual-location based direct conversation subscribing / pairing

- Benefit: low bandwidth - just audio and a bit of body positioning are transmitted, because low bandwidth can stream continuously for effort monitoring

x Problems: complexity of game servers, no facial expressions transmitted

2. 3D virtual presence with facial expressions

- this would use a face camera and computer vision to track key features on your face and eye movement, so called 'micro-gestures'

- then transmit these microgestures to your avatar for animation

3. 3D virtual presence with head tracking

- this would transmit your head motion to your avatar, so in a group meeting others can see who you are looking at when speaking

-- desktop: your head motion can be tracked by headset-mounted gyro

-- mobile: you hold and look at the face of your mobile device, and turn your body to turn your virtual head, in-phone gyro tracks your look angle

- in both cases what you see on your screen is a virtual room / world that pans as your gyro moves, so you can face someone and they know your are facing them

4. 3D virtual presence with facial expressions and head tracking

- combines 2, and 3

5. Augmented Reality (AR) mixing of onsite and avatar personnel

- the virtual meeting room is modeled after a real one

- those on-site would wear an AR headset, with virtual presence head and face tracking capabilities

- superimposed on the AR field of view would be virtual avatars (but not the geometry of the room, table, chairs, walls)

-- for this to work, the AR headset needs an additional capability: measure distance, so real table occludes part of virtual avatars

--- distance: an outfacing camera with outfacing offset laser fan, and turn around in room to scan all hardware and walls

--- or lidar

--- or measuring tape and manually model room

- for those attending by virtual avatar, they would have the same virtual experience except with virtual table and chairs and walls shown

Security tools:

0. refactor work so less security-needing work is done at home / via telework

1. local white-room - instead of working from home, a contracted office space with booths called whiterooms, would be located in each neighborhood

- you would walk to teleworking site

- the whiteroom -and you- would be swept for bugs, listening devices, un-authorized mobile devices, cameras etc

2. at home whiteroom equivalent

- you would have a white curtain behind you

- the camera facing you would be run by a machine vision AI system

- system would sweep / search for hidden facing the screen before you sat down

- a camera facing the screen: system would detect if you have a privacy filter over the screen to prevent oblique looks

- and verify there's a cover over the keyboard

- a special computer setup would encrypt keyboard keystrokes, prevent video cable intercepts, and limit copy and paste

- company documents would be rendered slightly different for each user, so a leak could be traced to source

- the camera would monitor for other people and shut off the screen if more than one person

3. at office end, if there's a roving robot: monitors/screens would be auto-redacted by placing recognizable targets on 4 corners of each monitor, and the system would be always searching for those targets and blanking out anything inside the 4 corners.

B. Dexterous work

a) clicking with mouse, game stick >

- some tasks just need a 3D point in space, for example for linear metal welding, just to say the start and end points of the weld.

- work end: 2 cameras side-by-side representing stereo view

-- still shots can be sent individually, or special stereo compression and decompression

- worker end: worker can move cameras side-to-side, and/or view stereoscopically with Virtual Reality (VR) head mounted display (HMD), or with other stereovision technology such as shutter glasses, anaglyph, or mirror-stereoscope + side-by-side viewports

b) hand / arm tracking:

- some tasks need full human dexterity

- gloves with targets can be worn, and

- 2 or more cameras watch/track the arms as they move

- the system extracts the glove targets, computes the arm, hand, finger poses and sends to the robot end.

- To save human energy and so worker so can be seated comfortably:

-- elbows on armrests and offsets can be applied to some/any part of the arm/hand pose

--- example: by using a footpedal to freeze output motion while input arm pose is adjusted

-- spring-loaded arm suspenders - elastics from ceiling/above holding up gloves