Gatebox: Technology and Romance
So what exactly is it?
Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri is something that’s already heavily incorporated in existing ubicomp in today’s society, however these virtual assistants don’t really have that spice of the human element of personal connection. One Japanese company aims to solve this by integrating both the functionality of virtual assistants and virtual companionship together through “Gatebox AI”.
“Gatebox Inc. is a venture company that aims to realize a world where you can live with
characters with the vision of “Living with Characters”. Currently, we are planning, developing, and selling the character summoning device “Gatebox” that enables communication with characters.”
The Gatebox is similar existing virtual assistants but unlike them, it has a projection in a tube-like device with a character projected inside that can partake in conversation using artificial intelligence to seem more personable and real. Along with conversation it can be hooked up to your house to act like a smart home but with a more personal touch, like texting you through the day to check up on you.
Physical Features
- LED trim that doubles as light and indicator for the device status.
- Various ports for external conections, including: hardline connection port for Ethernet access, 3.5 mm audiojack
- IR beam sender/reciever to remotely control surrounding devices
- Two motion sensors in the front to detect motion
- Camera utilized for facial recognition
- Touch sensor
- 1280x720 curved hologram display
- App integration for monitoring/AI chat
But why?
Haha, funny anime girl in a coffee maker but it’s more…
From the research paper, Japan’s emerging emotional tech, “Tōru Honda’s critique of “love capitalism” (renai shihonshugi), in which he argues that a postwar Japanese political economy tied love assiduously to income, consumerist dating, and the need to provide for a partner and children (Honda 2005). Unable to achieve this hegemonic “good life,” large swaths of men became “failures” or “losers” in the “love market”.
Honda proposes dropping out and playing a different game. As he sees it, sharing intimacy with the characters of manga and anime (on which Azuma is modeled), can be a viable alternative for some. These characters are not fictional as opposed to real, but rather both fictional and real, “two-dimensional” (nijigen) characters as opposed to “threedimensional” (sanjigen) humans, but still part of our everyday”
Now this scene from the GateBox’s promotion video is not too far-fetched. A common occurrence that occurs among workers in Japan is captured in the promo video for the product on YouTube. A man wakes up in a basic one bedroom apartment. There’s no pictures of family or personal belonging around. He waits for the bus, not interacting with anyone. He drink coffee alone at a table. He comes home from the bus alone. He is obviously overworked and when he does come home, it’s time for him to eat dinner and lie in bed to do the same cycle over, again and again. Throughout the day he is void of any interaction with another person. He is essentially alone with no connection to anything. Now image replacing these scenarios with a companion. The ultimate goal of the Gatebox is to amend this scenario and having something that recognizes your existence with affection in a tangible manner for more real connection. This isn’t really a far-fetched crazed anime obsession but rather something that is a growing epidemic that is happening Japan’s working society.
Possible Concerns
Gatebox isn’t going to be a direct competitor to the current tech giants of Amazon’s Alexa or Microsoft’s Cortana. A review by superjollymac on YouTube mentions the limited functionality of app, stating how it’s essentially just prompts to status updates (so it can change the timings of some features to adapt to your schedule) and general preset dialogue options. There is no actual conversation feature and all speech detection is done with only certain phrases, like “hello” or “I’m going leave in 30 minutes.” will result in a reply from the device.
Speculation for the Future
A requested feature that many current owner that have the ability to do their own customizations with the model of the device. With only two virtual models being available named, Azuma Hikari and Hatsue Miku, there is currently limited customization feature for those who want to make their device more their own.When I see this, the company can handle this by gaining permissions of various IPs and selling each model as extra DLC or allowing users to create models themselves on a computer and upload them to device to use.
Integration with current smart virtual assistants and being able to use their technologies to improve the functionality of the device. This would
There are instances where people have married their virtual assistants and are eligible to reap benefits from the company: “an action through the official Gatebox website, to provide its employees with the recognition of the marriage with a character, in addition to benefits for married couples, such as an additional value for maintaining the life of the couple and the day off on the partner’s birthday.” Currently, this is only for those employees within the Gatebox company but could be argued to spread to other companies as a real marriage.
Currenly there is “Grande” version of the product, which is a supersized version of the consumer version to used as a display for public spaces or to take the role of a real receptionist for a building.
