A Pilot Study on Determining the Relation Between Gaze Aversion and Interaction Experience

Abstract

Previous work in HHI and HRI demonstrates the impact of gaze on the human interaction experience (IE). In this paper, we discuss an experimental design that should enable measuring the influence of the gaze aversion ratio (GAR) on the users' IE with a social robot. We assume gaze behavior studied in HHI to be restrictive for autonomous social robots, limiting the time available to robots for perception tasks besides HRI. Our goal is to determine if a deviation from human gaze behavior is accepted by users in HRI. With an in-between experimental design we evaluate the effect of varied GAR on IE and behavioral measures. A pilot study with 9 participants suggests that averting the gaze for longer time spans is favorable.