July 3, 2018
Spring Quarter Highlights: Human Robot Interaction 2018, the Today Show, and Virtual Reality Robot Designer
Spring quarter flew by for us so here it is in a nutshell…
Today Show introduces EMAR project
The EMAR team appeared on the Today Show on April 13, 2018 in a segment on teen stress. Our project was presented as one of the “unconventional” attempts to reduce teen’s stress. Elin Bjöling, the project lead, was interviewed about the threatening impact of stresses on teenagers and how Project EMAR hopes to help teens manage stress.
In the video, she says: “Teens, they are born into a digital world, so it is very appropriate to be using technology in order to help them.” Our segment starts at 3:46.
Human Robot Interaction (HRI) Conference 2018
Three EMAR team members, Elin Björling, Alisa Kalegina, Maya Cakmak (pictured here visiting the top of the John Hancock Building). attended HRI 2018. Human Robot Interaction , an international conference that brings together academics and roboticists in Chicago in early March.
At HRI, Alisa Kalegina (Project EMAR Graduate Research Assistant) and Project EMAR technology lead, Maya Cakmak, were nominated for best paper for their paper titled, “Characterizing the Design Space of Rendered Robot Faces.” In addition, their paper is introduced in an article at IEEE Spectrum called “What People See in 157 Robot Faces.”
Researchers asked participants to evaluate the friendliness, intelligence, and trustworthiness of the robot faces. The first evaluation was on commercial robot faces, and the second evaluation was experimentally designed faces with specific facial features.
Kalegina and Cakmak found that lacking some of the facial features such as a mouth and pupils evoked “creepy” feelings. On the other hand, a feature of eyebrows regarded to be intelligent. It is fascinating to learn about what types of facial features influence people’s perception of a social robot.
The article indicates such information would be potentially useful to determine the social role of a specific robot – “if you want people to view your robot as effective at security, consider giving it eyelids but no mouth.”
Also at HRI, Project EMAR Team lead, Elin Björling presented a late breaking report, Teen-Robot Interaction A Pilot Study of Engagement with a Low-fidelity Prototype written with Project EMAR’s Design Lead, Emma Rose, and undergraduate research assistant, Rachel Ren.
Teens collaboratively design a robot prototype in VR
A branch of project EMAR incorporates a team of designers, developers, and researchers who are developing a virtual reality (VR) game called Robot Designer in which players can create a prototype of robot that they like. In the game, one can explore, assemble, and exchange different robot parts of head, body, arms, and legs on a skeleton.
The most interesting point of this game is the collaboration between two people. One person is located outside. He or she operates skeleton and spawns different robot parts from the catalog in the desktop screen. The other is located inside of VR. In the VR space, he or she grabs the parts and put them on the skeleton. To build a robot that both sides satisfy, they need to communicate and discuss with each other.
Our team wanted to see how much teens would enjoy building a robot prototype together, and it was even beyond we thought! On May 3rd, our team visited the VR club at Ballard High School to get feedback on our game.
In April and May, we also demoed our game at the Seattle VR Meetup twice and gathered lots of great usability feedback from attendees.
VR Team: Elin Björling, Graduate students: Ada Kim, Simran Bhatia, Dong Li
Interaction Field Studies
Finally, Project EMAR hit the field with some new teen-robot interaction studies. We visited Nathan Hale, Ingraham, Ballard, and Roosevelt high schools this quarter. We’ve gathered LOTS of really great data from teens who engaged with new robot prototypes and shared their thoughts about robots designed to help with stress. Next up, we need to analyze all of this data we’ve gathered to inform decisions about the design of EMAR.
EMAR in the field: Twed Abraha, Nicole Alvarez, Maya Cakmak, Kartika Rathee, Elin Björling, Sara Tie
