Development of eye-ball robot serving, as a bodily media and its applicability as a communication means

Abstract

Co-sharing the context among remote persons by current IT communication system is considered to require co-existing feeling or "Ba", which is generated by a bodily interaction in face-to-face communication. The paper shows development of four eye-ball robots and shows a communication supporting system using these eye-ball robots as a bodily media. All eye-ball robots can express bodily movement such as gaze direction blink and nod in real-time, in order to generate a feeling as if you were gazed at by a person Furthermore, the forth robot can transform facial outline and eye situation applying the remote person's physiological fluctuations such as respiration and cardiac beat provided. The communication experiment using second and third eye-ball robots as each remote person agent, shows subconscious bodily synchronization, or entertainment which is generated in smooth face-to-face communication through the robot's movement. In another experiment, using a forth eye-ball robot, the attention sharing between the robot and person facing the robot associated through the robot's movements Moreover, we found an expectation that the operator has a feeling of "get united with the remote robot" by seeing a pseudo-nose in the video image. All these findings suggest that an eye-ball robot can support electively telecommunication to a bodily media for generating co-existing feeling.