Move, hold and touch: A framework for Tangible gesture interactive systems

© 2015 by the authors. Technology is spreading in our everyday world, and digital interaction beyond the screen, with real objects, allows taking advantage of our natural manipulative and communicative skills. Tangible gesture interaction takes advantage of these skills by bridging two popular domains in Human-Computer Interaction, tangible interaction and gestural interaction. In this paper, we present the Tangible Gesture Interaction Framework (TGIF) for classifying and guiding works in this field. We propose a classification of gestures according to three relationships with objects: move, hold and touch. Following this classification, we analyzed previous work in the literature to obtain guidelines and common practices for designing and building new tangible gesture interactive systems. We describe four interactive systems as application examples of the TGIF guidelines and we discuss the descriptive, evaluative and generative power of TGIF

Abstract expressions of affect

What form should happiness take? And how is disgust shaped? This research investigates how synthetic affective expressions can be designed with minimal reference to the human body. The authors propose that the recognition and attribution of affect expression can be triggered by appropriately presenting the bare essentials used in the mental processes that mediate the recognition and attribution of affect. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in the fact that it is based on mental processes involved in the recognition of affect, independent of the configuration of the human body and face. The approach is grounded in (a) research on the role of abstraction in perception, (b) the elementary processes and features relevant to visual emotion recognition and emotion attribution, and (c) how such features can be used (and combined) to generate a synthetic emotion expression. To further develop the argument for this approach they present a pilot study that shows the feasibility of combining affective features independently of the human configuration by using abstraction to create consistent emotional attributions. Finally, the authors discuss the potential implications of their approach for the design of affective robots. The developed design approach promises a maximization of freedom to integrate intuitively understandable affective expressions with other morphological design factors a technology may require, providing synthetic affective expressions that suit the inherently artificial and applied nature of affective technology

Heart Rate Monitoring as an Easy Way to Increase Engagement in Human-Agent Interaction

Physiological sensors are gaining the attention of manufacturers and users. As denoted by devices such as smartwatches or the newly released Kinect 2 -- which can covertly measure heartbeats -- or by the popularity of smartphone apps that track heart rate during fitness activities. Soon, physiological monitoring could become widely accessible and transparent to users. We demonstrate how one could take advantage of this situation to increase users' engagement and enhance user experience in human-agent interaction. We created an experimental protocol involving embodied agents -- "virtual avatars". Those agents were displayed alongside a beating heart. We compared a condition in which this feedback was simply duplicating the heart rates of users to another condition in which it was set to an average heart rate. Results suggest a superior social presence of agents when they display feedback similar to users' internal state. This physiological "similarity-attraction" effect may lead, with little effort, to a better acceptance of agents and robots by the general public.Comment: PhyCS - International Conference on Physiological Computing Systems, Feb 2015, Angers, France. SCITEPRESS, \<http://www.phycs.org/\&g

Expression of Grounded Affect: How Much Emotion Can Arousal Convey?

Springer: © 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of Hickton L., Lewis M., Cañamero L. (2020) Expression of Grounded Affect: How Much Emotion Can Arousal Convey?. In: Mohammad A., Dong X., Russo M. (eds) Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems. TAROS 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12228. Springer, Cham. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63486-5_26.In this paper we consider how non-humanoid robots can communicate their affective state via bodily forms of communication (kinesics), and the extent to which this influences how humans respond to them. We propose a simple model of grounded affect and kinesic expression before presenting the qualitative findings of an exploratory study (N=9), during which participants were interviewed after watching expressive and non-expressive hexapod robots perform different ‘scenes’. A summary of these interviews is presented and a number of emerging themes are identified and discussed. Whilst our findings suggest that the expressive robot did not evoke significantly greater empathy or altruistic intent in humans than the control robot, the expressive robot stimulated greater desire for interaction and was also more likely to be attributed with emotion

Metaphors Matter: Top-Down Effects on Anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human mental states and characteristics to non-human entities, has been widely demonstrated to be cued automatically by certain bottom-up appearance and behavioral features in machines. In this thesis, I argue that the potential for top-down effects to influence anthropomorphism has so far been underexplored. I motivate and then report the results of a new empirical study suggesting that top-down linguistic cues, including anthropomorphic metaphors, personal pronouns, and other grammatical constructions, increase anthropomorphism of a robot. As robots and other machines become more integrated into human society and our daily lives, more thorough understanding of the process of anthropomorphism becomes more critical: the cues that cause it, the human behaviors elicited, the underlying mechanisms in human cognition, and the implications of our influenced thought, talk, and treatment of robots for our social and ethical frameworks. In these regards, as I argue in this thesis and as the results of the new empirical study suggest, the top-down effects matter

Using Shape-Change to Express Dynamic Affordances of Intelligent Systems

As intelligent systems permeate the world, our everyday lives are made easier and less tedious. However, there exist too many “intelligent” systems whose lack of communication or low intelligibility frustrate users. In this study, we present a tangible interface aimed to bridge human-system interaction. It expresses behaviors through shape-change, and its body movements indicate system status and are responsive and rapid enough for perceptual crossing. Based on preliminary results of a user study conducted with 16 participants, the prototype’s implicit interactions show promise in establishing a basic dialog and point to goals and challenges in designing technology that feels truly “smart.