The two of us used the Remote Touch script in order to relay human consciousness over a distance. Once our devices were connected and transmitting data, we signed off the zoom call and did other activities for a period of time, keeping the data connection going.

Yael’s experience:
I began by eating a burrito, so I felt like I was making a lot more contact with the sensors than Rebecca. I was sometimes unsure if a change in the light color was something I triggered or if it was a message from Rebecca. However, whenever I was confident that I was receiving a message from Rebecca, it was exciting, knowing that I was connected to a person and that they were moving somewhere far away, but I was being told personally about it. After some time, I stopped focusing on the device attached to me and continued with my tasks, eating a burrito and talking to my friends. At this point, I wasn’t paying attention to the device as much and sometimes a thought in the back of my head was that I could be missing a signal. This would then cause me to pause what I was doing and stare for a period of time, waiting to see if I would receive something. My friends would sometimes point out during conversations if the sensors changed colors in a moment that I couldn’t see it.

Rebecca’s Experience:
I strapped the Bluefruit microcontroller onto my cubital fossa (“elbow pit”), as that seemed like a location that’d allow for a lot of unintentional touch. But conveying remote presence without actually going in to deliberately press on the sensor was harder than I thought — especially when all I was doing was sitting in front of a screen and typing, shifting occasionally, and taking it off to go to the bathroom.

Sitting in a dimly light room and listening to pattering of rain outside, it was actually really nice to see the pink LED flicker against my white hoodie. Subtle, rosy reminders of life outside my room. The color selection, and the contrast between the bright blue and the warm pink particularly, had the biggest role in conveying touch. That, and the arbitrary locations of the flickers. It actually felt kind of warm and intimate, and I really did feel Yael’s presence from however far away she actually was.

We were limited by our (lack of) coding experience and the length of the micro USB, but based on my experience with only the LEDs, I see a lot of potential for this microcontroller to convey remote presence.