Humanlike robots interact with people in daily situations, and various studies concerning such robots have been conducted. However, robots are easily ignored due to their lack of social presence, with their customer service behavior and sales strategies not working well in many situations. In this paper, we aim to improve the social presence of a sales robot by enabling shared attention with visitors. In an actual shop, we investigated whether a robot could improve its social presence by indicating that it could understand the gaze direction of visitors. We found that the robot's statements regarding the direction of the visitor's gaze information and the timing of such statements with the visitor's gaze change improved the robot's social presence, leading to an increase in the number of groups that looked at the robot for a longer period. This paper reveals that enabling shared attention between humans and robots can strengthen a robot's social presence and its ability to work effectively in a real-world environment.

Robotic salespersons have been adopted by many shops. However, due to the weakness of their social presence, they are easily ignored by visitors. Thus, we focused on such robots' behaviors that can strengthen their social presence in a real-world shop. In this research, our goal is to develop a model that can obtain visitors' replies to the robot's utterances. For this reason, we conducted a laboratory experiment and two field experiments. In the laboratory experiment, we found that the robot's ability to express that it can understand the degree of visitors' attention to the robot is important for improving its social presence. Afterward, we developed an engagement estimation model (EEM) based on the findings obtained from the laboratory experiment. We defined visitors' engagement as the probability that the visitors will reply to the robot's utterances. The EEM estimates the engagement from the visitors' real-time nonverbal data. In a laboratory experiment, the situation of being in the laboratory can make the interaction between the participants and the robot unnatural. Therefore, we developed a model based on data of visitors' nonverbal cues in the field experiment and examined whether the model works effectively in the real-world environment. As a result, the automatic greeting mode based on the EEM facilitated the participant's reply to the robot. Thus, we considered that this is because the automatic greeting mode could make a decision of the robot's next behavior precisely. It can be considered that the visitors may feel as if the robot could understand their degree of attention to the robot when the robot greets the visitors based on the automatic greeting mode. Therefore, the automatic greeting mode based on the EEM worked effectively in a real-world environment and could strengthen its social presence.

We conducted an experiment, in which we found that training a drone increased its animacy, attachment to it, and affinity with it. Additionally, we found that the drone impressed trainers as a puppy while it impressed non-trainers as a fly.

In recent years, robotic salespersons have been rapidly deployed in various shops especially in Japan. However, it is still unclear what kind of action is effective for sales, and robotic salespersons are often ignored by customers. In this paper, we analyzed the multimodal conversations between a robotic salesperson and visitors by conducting a field experiment. We aim to investigate the actions of the robot that lead to interactive conversations. The results of the experiment showed that in order to conduct an interactive conversation, it is necessary to a give short speech that is easy to answer. The most important finding obtained from this research is that the impression of a robot is strongly influenced by the beginning of the interaction. When a robot gives a short speech that is easy to answer at the beginning of the interaction, an interactive conversation can start because the customers treat the robot similar to a salesperson which is capable of humanlike interaction.

Current videoconferencing systems can be roughly divided into two types: a window-type where a computer display works as a window to reveal a remote partner, and a mirror-type whose display shows the mirrored reflections of both participants. While mirror-type systems enhance the feeling of togetherness by merging the two sites into one display, an inherent problem remains. Despite the mirror metaphor, the partner has no physical body in front of the display. To cope with this incongruence, we placed a partition in front of the display. Across that partition we further also placed a robotic table and a robotic bench that move based on the partner's behavior. The experiments indicated that the table and bench successfully facilitated feeling as if there were the partner's physical body was present at the opposite side of the partition.

There are several merits to embody the remote partner's body to the video conference: showing it physically, making a physical contact, and enhancing social telepresence. In this paper, we tackled to embody a part of a remote partner's body in a video conference. As a method to show how effectively the embodied body part works, we focused on face-to-face communication of the hand gestures such as thumb wrestling, finger number game and pointing. We developed a robotic arm, which seems the remote partner's arm popped out from the video. Our robot arm synchronizes with the remote partner's arm movements. We conducted experiments to verify the method of embodying a part of a remote partner's body. We found that, our method reduced the feeling of being far from the remote partner, and enhanced social telepresence, comparing video and physical embodiment.

Previous research has made various efforts to produce human-like presence of autonomous social robots. However, such efforts often require costly equipment and complicated mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a new method that makes a user feel as if an autonomous robot is controlled by a remote operator, with virtually no cost. The basic idea is to manipulate people's knowledge about a robot by using priming technique. Through a series of experiments, we discovered that subjects tended to deduce the presence/absence of a remote operator based on their prior experience with that same remote operator. When they interacted with an autonomous robot after interacting with a teleoperated robot (i.e., a remote operator) whose appearance was identical as the autonomous robot, they tended to feel that they were still talking with the remote operator. The physically embodied talking behavior reminded the subjects of the remote operator's presence that was felt at the prior experience. Their deductions of the presence/absence of a remote operator were actually based on their “beliefs” that they had been interacting with a remote operator. Even if they had interacted with an autonomous robot under the guise of a remote operator, they tended to believe that they were interacting with a remote operator even when they subsequently interacted with an autonomous robot.

In this study, we developed a telepresence system which has a flexible and deformable screen. The screen deforms in synchronization with the move of the objects on the projected video. This deformation of the display surface provides the perception of depth for the projected video. We attempted to add the perception of depth to the video of the remote person and extend a video conferencing system. The results of the experiment suggested that the perception of depth provided by system strengthens the presence of a remote person and an object on the video.

In 1, an error in one of the author names has been found subsequent to the publication. “Ishiguro Hiroshi” should be “Hiroshi Ishiguro.” The correct name is now presented above.

Summary Thanks to the maturity of motion tracking technologies, it became easy and inexpensive to use avatars that reflect the user's facial and body motions in real time. There is a possibility that those real‐time avatars can serve as a substitute for videos in distant communication. We conducted two experiments to confirm positive effects of avatars on distant communication. In the first experiment, the subjects watched a conversation partner's video, avatar, photo, or nothing when speaking to the partner. Because the video and avatar delivered the partner's motion while the video and photo delivered the partner's appearance, we were able to observe the effects of the motion and appearance separately. As a result, we found that presenting the motion via a video or an avatar increased the degree of the smoothness of speaking to the partner, but the appearance did not significantly affect such an influence. In the second experiment, we compared the avatar and teleoperated robot to find how a physical embodiment influences the degree of the smoothness of speech. Teleoperated robots resemble avatars in transmitting the user's body motions without disclosing the user's appearance but differ in reflecting these motions onto a robot that has a physical embodiment. We predicted that the robot produces smoother speech because the physical embodiment might make the body motions recognizable. However, the robot decreased the degree of the smoothness of speech against our expectation. The results of these experiments showed that real‐time avatars that present only body motions are enough to smooth distant communication. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Since past studies on haptic and visual communication have tended to be isolated from each other, it has remained unclear whether a touch channel can still enrich mediated communication where video and audio channels are already available. To clarify this, we analyzed remote handshaking in which a robot hand that was attached just under a videoconferencing terminal's display moved according to the opening and closing motion of a conversation partner's hand. Combining touch and video channels raises a question as to whether the partner's action of touching a haptic device should be visible to the user. If it can be invisible, the action may be unnecessary, and a unilaterally controlled device may be enough to establish an effective touch channel. Our analysis revealed that the feeling of being close to the partner can be enhanced by mutual touch in which the partner's action needs to occur but should be invisible.

This paper shows that the augmentation of a remote person's positional movement enhances social telepresence. There are three possible ways of representing a remote person's movement toward the user in visual communication: a) the remote person's movement toward the remote camera, b) the remote camera's zooming in to enlarge the remote person's picture, and c) a forward movement of the display that is displaying the remote person. We conducted an experiment to see the relationship among these three ways and the effects of a remote camera's zooming and a display's movement on social telepresence. In the experiment, we observed that the remote person's movement lowered the reality of conversations, and the remote camera's zooming lowered the visual quality. However, social telepresence was enhanced when both the person's movement and the camera's zooming occurred simultaneously. We also observed that a 6-centimeter movement of the display enhanced social telepresence, whether the remote person moved or not.

Media space is a promising but still immature technology to connect distributed sites. We developed a simple additional function that moved a remote camera forward when a local user approached a display so that the approach was amplified by a remote person's expanding image accompanied by motion parallax. We conducted an experiment in which we observed that a movable camera enhanced social telepresence, which is the feeling of facing a remote person in the same room. Despite the camera's movement, subjects believed that the camera did not move and a zoom-in function expanded the image. Surprisingly, a zoom-in camera that expanded the image as the movable camera did, however, was ineffective probably because of a lack of motion parallax. Although we explained nothing about the camera, most subjects noticed that their walking caused the view's expansion. If a remote person initiated the camera's movement, social telepresence could not be enhanced.

Recently, various robots capable of having a video chat with distant people have become commercially available. This paper shows that movement of these robots enhances distant people's presence that the robot operator feels. We conducted an experiment to compare the degrees of social telepresence produced by fixed, rotatable, movable, and automatically moving cameras. In this experiment we found that forward-backward movement of the camera significantly contributed to social telepresence, while rotation did not. We also found that this effect disappeared when the camera moved automatically. We propose the user-controllable movement of cameras as a fundamental function for video-based communication systems.

Many studies have been conducted on supporting communication in home and office spaces, but relatively few studies have explored supporting communication in large-scale public spaces, despite the importance of such environments in our daily lives. We propose a transcendent means of communication as an emerging style in this pervasive computing era: a system that allows administrative staff to effectively help visitors in large-scale public spaces. The visitors' context is used to provide a bird's-eye view of a simulated public space for the staff to grasp the situation and point at a particular location within the view to indicate the visitors they intend to address. The results of an experiment showed synergic effects between the bird's-eye view and the first-person one in determining the spatial movements of people. In indoor and outdoor large-scale public spaces, a central railway station and a park, we installed our prototypes and learned the implications of its use.

We have integrated technologies related to virtual social interaction, e.g. virtual environments, visual simulations, and lifelike characters. In our previous efforts to integrate them, the asymmetry between agents and avatars made the systems too complex to be used widely. Another crucial problem we faced is that it took a long time to construct agents that play various roles, since each role needs its specific behavioral repertory. To eliminate these problems, we developed a general-use platform, FreeWalk/Q, in which agents and avatars can share the same interaction model and scenario. We created a control mechanism to reduce the behavioral differences between agents and avatars, and a description method to design the external role rather than the internal mechanism. In the development, we found that it was necessary to prepare several topologies of control mechanism and several granular levels of description method.

This paper introduces a new application area for agents in the computer interface: the support of human-human interaction. We discuss an interface agent prototype that is designed to support human-human communication in virtual environments. The prototype interacts with users strategically during conversation, spending most of its time listening. The prototype mimics a party host, trying to find a safe common topic for guests whose conversation has lagged. We performed an experimental evaluation of the prototype's ability to assist in cross-cultural conversations. We designed the prototype to introduce safe or unsafe topics to conversation pairs, through a series of questions and suggestions. The agent made positive contributions to participants' experience of the conversation, influenced their perception of each other and of each others' national group, and even seemed to effect their style of behavior. We discuss the implications of our research for the design of social agents to support human-human interaction.

Article FreeWalk: supporting casual meetings in a network Share on Authors: Hideyuki Nakanishi Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, Yoshida Honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 606-01 Japan Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, Yoshida Honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 606-01 JapanView Profile , Chikara Yoshida Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, Yoshida Honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 606-01 Japan Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, Yoshida Honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 606-01 JapanView Profile , Toshikazu Nishimura Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, Yoshida Honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 606-01 Japan Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, Yoshida Honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 606-01 JapanView Profile , Toru Ishida Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, Yoshida Honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 606-01 Japan Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, Yoshida Honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 606-01 JapanView Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '96: Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workNovember 1996 Pages 308–314https://doi.org/10.1145/240080.240314Published:16 November 1996 82citation564DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations82Total Downloads564Last 12 Months19Last 6 weeks2 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access