”Ah! he wants to win!”: Social responses to playing Tic-Tac-Toe against a physical drawing robot

Abstract

We present an exploratory human participant study (N=3) examining how people interact with a pen-plotting robot that interactively plays Tic-Tac-Toe on a shared physical sheet of paper. Each participant played a round of Tic-Tac-Toe against the robot, while we observed. We particularly focused our observations on the participants’ physical and social behaviors during game interaction, as well as in-moment reactions from the participants. Following each game, we performed semi-structured qualitative interviews to understand the user’s experience interacting with the robot. Our questions were designed to elicit comparisons of their experience with less tangible interactions that players might have with a computer or phone-based app, as well as more traditional interactions that players might have with other people. We found that participants directly addressed the robot by talking to it during play and openly expressed competitiveness against the robot. Furthermore, participants displayed careful movements around the robot and attentively observed its behaviors. Based on these initial insights from our exploratory study, we are planning future experiments to investigate the effect that the mutuality of the physical Tic-Tac-Toe interaction has on social responses to the robot to understand what this implies for embodied and tangible interaction design.