Let Me Get To Know You Better: Can Interactions Help to Overcome Uncanny Feelings?

Abstract

With an ever increasing demand for personal service robots and artificial assistants, companies, start-ups and researchers aim to better understand what makes robot platforms more likable. Some argue that increasing a robot's humanlikeness leads to a higher acceptability. Others, however, find that extremely humanlike robots are perceived as uncanny and are consequently often rejected by users. When investigating people's perception of robots, the focus of the related work lies almost solely on the first impression of these robots, often measured based on images or video clips of the robots alone. Little is known about whether these initial positive or negative feelings persist when giving people the chance to interact with the robot. In this paper, 48 participants were gradually exposed to the capabilities of a robot and their perception of it was tracked from their first impression to after playing a short interactive game with it. We found that initial uncanny feelings towards the robot were significantly decreased after getting to know it better, which further highlights the importance of using real interactive scenarios when studying people's perception of robots. In order to elicit uncanny feelings, we used the 3D blended embodiment Furhat and designed four different facial textures for it. Our work shows that a blended platform can cause different levels of discomfort towards it depending on the facial texture and may thus be an interesting tool for further research on the uncanny valley.