ChameleonMask

Submission 1,204

About

ChameleonMask is a wearable communication technology via a video-based face mask. Remote users transit live broadcast of their face, similar to other video chat applications like Skype and Apple FaceTime, while a present surrogate wears the mask, leading some to refer to it as a "Human Uber."

History

On April 6th, 2015, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) released a video introdcution to ChameleonMask entitled "ChameleonMask: Embodied Physical and Social Telepresence using human surrogates." The post received more than 47,000 views (shown below).

Later that month, on April 20th, Twitter^[4] user @k_garten tweeted a "Live demo of ChameleonMask #telepresence #chi2015" (shown below, left).

On January 30th, 2018, at the EmTech Asia^[1]^[3] conference, the device was introduced by Jun Rekimotom, the device's inventor. The EmTech Asia's Twitter account tweeted an image of the introduction (shown below, center)

MIT Tech Review writer Will Knight"tweeted":/memes/sites/twitter/ ^[2] a photograph of the device with the caption, "“Human Uber,” developed in Japan, provides a way to attend events remotely using another person’s body. “It’s surprisingly natural” says its inventor, Jin Rekimoto of Sony #emtechasia." The tweet received more than 9,100 retweets and 13,000 likes in less than one year (shown below, right).

Reception

On February 15th, 2018, Vice ^[5]published a negative review of the system, which they called "terrible." They wrote:

"The iPad over the face of the Human Uber that I've sent into work today as my surrogate is our broke-ass DIY attempt at ChameleonMask, and visually speaking, it’s pretty spot on. ChameleonMask, after all, is basically just an iPad over a face, by any means necessary. The only flaw in our version's design is that it is nearly impossible for the surrogate to see, what with his face stuffed behind a computer and all."

[…]

"After the first hour, all I’ve done is walk him through turning on my computer and logging into all the accounts I need to do my job (email, Slack, Chartbeat, VICE’s CMS, Twitter), a process that usually takes a few short minutes. Just finding this doc today took nearly half an hour."