Designing Elements for a Gaze Sensitive Object: Meet the CoffeePet

It is not difficult to design an object that is sensitive to our gaze. The challenging part is to make the user realize it. And since people are not used to interacting with an object by simply moving their eyes (people use eyes to see, not to trigger something), the interaction itself become unfamiliar to them. Based on the gaze behavior of people socializing with others, we believe that the feeling of being looked back when interacting with a gaze sensitive object is rather crucial in order to overcome the problem of unfamiliarity and to make people naturally realize that the object was sensitive to their gaze behavior. To achieve this feeling, we conclude that eyes need to be presence in the user's view. In this paper, we present an anthropomorphize coffee machine called the CoffeePet, attached with two, small OLED screen that displays animated eyes. These eyes are responsive towards the user's gaze behavior. Furthermore, the CoffeePet will automatically start to brew the drink if the user manages to maintain a prolonged eye contact with it. In three experiments, we investigated the impact of the animated eyes in aiding the participants to become familiar and to realize that their gaze behavior influences the CoffeePet to react. Without being told on how to interact with the CoffeePet, participants were randomly assigned to participate in one of three conditions. 1) CoffeePet with watching eyes (eyes with direct gaze), 2) CoffeePet with interactive gaze model, and 3) CoffeePet with interactive gaze following. The results showed that the interactive sharing gaze did, in fact, lead the participants to become familiar and to realize that they can interact with the object by simply moving their eyes.