Page 40 - Designing Sociable Robots

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Robot in Society: A Question of Interface 21

attention is paid to the issues of life-like behavior and engaging the students at an affec-
tive level.
There are a number of graphical systems where the avatar predominantly consists of a
face with minimal to no body. A good example is Gandalf, a precursor system of Rea. The
graphical component of the agent consisted of a face and a hand. It could answer a variety
of questions about the solar system but required the user to wear a substantial amount of
equipment in order to sense the user’s gestures and head orientation (Thorisson, 1998). In
Takeuchi and Nagao (1993), the use of an expressive graphical face to accompany dialogue
is explored. They found that the facial component was good for initiating new users to the
system, but its benefit was not as pronounced over time.
Interactive Characters

There are a variety of interactive characters under development for the entertainment do-
main. The emphasis for each system is compelling, life-like behavior and characters with
personality. Expressive, readable behavior is of extreme importance for the human to un-
derstand the interactive story line. Instead of passively viewing a scripted story, the user
creates the story interactively with the characters.
A number of systems have been developed by at the MIT Media Lab (see figure 2.2).
One of the earliest systems was the ALIVE project (Maes et al., 1996). The best-known
character of this project is Silas, an animated dog that the user could interact with using
gesture within a virtual space (Blumberg, 1996). Several other systems have since been

Figure 2.2
Some examples of life-like characters. To the left are the animated characters of Swamped!. The racoon is com-
pletely autonomous, whereas the human controls the animated chicken through a plush toy interface. To the right
is a human interacting with Silas from the ALIVE project. Images courtesy of Bruce Blumberg from the Synthetic
Characters Group. Images c MIT Media Lab.