Does an Animation Character Robot Increase Sales?

This paper investigates whether a network robot salesclerk system increases sales in real shopping contexts. Our robot system, which consists of an autonomous virtual agent and a semi-autonomous physical agent, enables customers to interact with the virtual agents on their smartphones and reserve special character merchandise. Moreover, their virtual agent is transferred to the physical agent at the shop to physically distribute the reserved merchandise to customers. Through such cyber-physical interaction, we provided rich shopping experiences to customers to increase sales. We collaborated with an animation company, Production I.G Inc., and employed an animation character named Tachikoma from the Ghost in the Shell:Stand Alone Complex (a.k.a S.A.C. seriese) universe to design the appearance and the characteristics of both agents. We conducted field trials to investigate whether the developed system contributed to sales related to the animation merchandise of Ghost in the Shell, and the results showed our system's effectiveness.