Thanks to the folks at Double Robotics, I've been enjoying a cushy, comfortable work life from anywhere I want while maintaining a physical interactive presence at Business Insider's world headquarters.
This is what I look like at work lately:
Karyne Levy
Double is a telecommuter's dream come true. Technology can make so much of the tedium of workplace communication far more manageable — you've got your email, AIM, or heaven forbid, an old-fashioned phone call — but for those occasions where an in-person conversation is required, or when you actually need to see something (e.g. a conference or convention), we now have the Double telepresence robot.
"Telepresence" is hardly a new idea — it's just a souped-up name given to a collection of technologies enabling you to have a "presence" somewhere else, a window of picture and sound. Cisco even has an entire arm of its business built on this, selling devices ranging from small Internet-connected phones with video capabilities to huge "immersive telepresence" systems that take up a board room wall.
Double isn't the first company to pair telepresence with robotics, but it's the first to do so in an intuitive and non-threatening way. They've done the hard stuff already. All you need to add to the recipe is your iPad. Get it connected to the Internet, pair it to the robot via Bluetooth, and start up the Double app on the iPad. That's it! You can now navigate the thing from anywhere with an Internet connection, speaking and gesticulating to people just as you normally would.
Once set up, I found the navigation to be a little clunky on an iPad's touchscreen, preferring to steer it from a computer keyboard given a couple decades of "practice" with computer games.
There's a slight learning curve to the spatial awareness aspect of this — you will run into people or otherwise find ways to make the robot fall over, but that's quickly remedied after 15 minutes or so of practice. A mirror in the Double's iPad frame lets you use the iPad's rear-facing camera to instead look down at the robot's wheels, HUGELY beneficial for negotiating tight spaces. With practice, my method became to steer using keyboard keys and to switch to the downward view (it only takes the press of a spacebar) every 15 or 20 seconds to be extra-sure I wasn't bumping into things.
Double's height is adjustable to two positions. The raised position is a good height for others to see you and speak to you when you're in a meeting or largely stationary. The lowered position drops the Double's center of gravity, making it a bit speedier and more suited for getting around, topping out at one mile per hour.