Since a telepresence system is a system intended to be used in interpersonal communication, conveying the presence of a remote sender is an important issue. Robotic telepresence system is a newer variant of a telepresence system. Even though robot characteristics of having physical embodiment could be effective on building presence of itself, this could yield distortion of presence of a remote sender in telepresence. Thus, in order to determine effective methods of increasing sender presence during telecommunication, we perform a two within-participants experiment, considering the effects of the embodiment levels, by comparing a weakly-embodied telepresence system, a tablet and a strongly-embodied telepresence system, a telepresence robot (number of participants, N = 48). In this study, the participants engage in conversations with a remote sender either through a tablet or a telepresence robot. The results show that participants have a lesser sense of sender presence for a strongly-embodied telepresence system compared to the weakly-embodied telepresence system. On the other hand, participants perceived more presence of a telepresence system toward a strongly-embodied telepresence system than a weakly-embodied telepresence system. The implications of these findings are the weakly-embodied telepresence systems would be effectively used in settings where emotional connection is a priority. In addition, incorporating sensory modalities should be considered for neutralizing the negative effects of strong embodiment on presence.

In this paper, a STEAM education was developed by applying intelligent product design. One promising approach to improve children's STEAM attitudes, knowledge, and skills is to utilize robotics in the program. As an intelligent product is a robot with the shape of the common object, intelligent product design could allow children to learn robotics and product design. Field trial of STEAM education was held at a Korean elementary school for two weeks. After the field trial, children evaluated the perception toward a common product and a developed intelligent product. The results showed that the intelligent product was perceived more positively and intelligent than the common product.

As a robot has both characteristics of humanness and productness, we explored which characteristic is more dominant between them. In order to explore the impact of communicator types on social presence and shyness in physical contact, we executed a 3 (communicator types: a human vs. a robot vs. a product) with-in participants experiment (N=30). Participants felt more social presence to a person than a robot, and a product. On the other hand, participants felt more shyness to a person than a product, and a robot.

Robots could be classified into an autonomous robot and a tele-operated robot according to the levels of autonomy. As a match between robot types and task types is important, we explored the impact of robot types and task types on social presence, trustworthiness, and willingness to follow the robot's advice in art appraising situation. We executed a 2(robot types: autonomous robot vs. tele-operated robot) X 2(task types: quantitative task vs. qualitative task) mixed-participants experiment (N=30). Participants perceived more social presence toward the tele-operated robot than the autonomous robot while the autonomous robot was perceived more trustworthy than the tele-operated robot. The robot types and the task types had an interaction effect on the perceived trustworthiness and the willingness to follow the advice. Implications for the appropriate design by the robot types and the task types regarding human-robot interaction are discussed.

The objective of this study is to examine the effect of robot types on emotional communication between a person and a robot. We executed a 2 (robot types: an autonomous robot vs. a tele-operated robot) within-participants experiment (N=36). Participants were interviewed with either autonomous robot interviewers or tele-operated robot interviewers, and asked how much they felt social presence of robot interviewers and embarrassment toward robot interviewers. Participants felt more social presence to tele-operated robots than autonomous robots. Moreover, participants felt more embarrassment when they were interviewed with tele-operated robots than autonomous robots.

According to the Hawthorne effect, when people feel someone staring at them, they tend to be moral because of psychological pressure. We applied this Hawthorne effect to the appearance design of robots and examined the effect of robot appearance types on motivating donation. We executed a 2 (appearance types: anthropomorphic vs. functional) within-participants experiment (N=20). Participants perceived more social presence to an anthropomorphic robot than a functional robot. In addition, participants were more willing to donate when interacting with an anthropomorphic robot than a functional robot.

This study explores the effect of robot design approaches on the consumers' acceptance of robots. We executed a 2-level (robot design: human-oriented vs. product-oriented) between participants experiment (N=52). Participants categorized a human-oriented robot and a product-oriented robot differently, and a product-oriented robot was more effective than a human-oriented robot for consumers' evaluation and purchase intention toward robots.

The objective of this study is to examine the effect of the robot types on emotional engagement with robots. Robots are classified into an autonomous robot and a tele-operated robot according to the levels of autonomy. On the contrary, robots could be distinguished depending on the levels of human intervention required for controlling a robot. An autonomous robot performs task by itself while a tele-operated robot requires an operator's help in task-oriented activity. In emotional communication, an autonomous robot expresses robotic emotions by itself whereas a tele-operated robot delivers an operator's emotions to a receiver. In this study, we compared the impact of the two robot types on perceived intelligence and social presence of robots. We executed a 2 (robot types: an autonomous robot vs. a tele-operated robot) within-participants experiment (N=36). Participants had an interview with either autonomous robot interviewers or tele-operated robot interviewers. They evaluated autonomous robots as more intelligent than tele-operated robots while they felt more social presence toward tele-operated robots than autonomous robots. Implications for design of social robots to increase humans' emotional engagement with robots are discussed.

ABSTRACT We propose a new image‐space technique to summarize a 3D animation sequence into a single image by using the depth information of the animation. The proposed method extracts important frames from the animation sequence, where the important frames are representative of the sequence and keep the complexity of a composed image as simple as possible. Assuming that the input sequence consists of a set of images with depth information, we construct a composite depth image and its gradient image. We evaluate the importance of each frame by its amount of contribution to the gradient of the composite depth image. The frames of higher importance are located more likely at which the motion of a moving object reaches the extreme positions, the fastest speed, and the slowest speed in image space. From the most important frames to the least ones, we recursively compose the important frames into a single composite image while keeping the complexity of the composite image by evaluating the amount of self‐overlap. The threshold value for the amount of overlap allows a user to control interactively the visual complexity of the composed image. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

ABSTRACT We present a technique to parameterize skin deformation by skeletal motion and to transfer the deformation style from one character to another. We decompose skin deformation into time‐varying signals and basis matrices by using dimension reduction techniques and then approximate the time‐varying signals by using radial basis functions with respect to joint angles that define skeletal motion. This decomposition reduces the size of deformation data to a small number of time‐varying signals that represent the complex role of muscle action. The subsequent parameterization yields a fast and intuitive control of characters; thus, it allows us to construct faithful skin deformations quickly as skeletal bones move. The representation of our parameterization allows us to capture and transfer a derived deformation style to another skeleton–skin structure without considering the input dimension of the deformation data. This style transfer can be used as a basis for realistically animating variants of sample characters that have the same skeletal topology. Parameterization of skin deformation and its style transfer can be performed within a small amount of error once the preprocessing time and control of the deformation is carried out in real time by our graphics processing unit implementation. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract Noise is used to create realistic animations that look like natural phenomena as well as procedural textures and shapes by adding randomness to graphical applications. In this paper, we suggest a method to edit noise values to satisfy the constraints that reflect the user's demands while maintaining the inherent statistical features of the noise function. Noise editing uses optimization to minimize the difference between the statistical characteristics of the ideal and edited versions of a noise source. Using our editing method, detailed control of animation and shape data that include noise is possible. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.