Systematic Variation of Gaze Timings and Effects on the Human Level of Comfort and Feeling of Being Attended

Gaze is an intuitive and effective human-robot interaction (HRI) modality as it communicates the attention of a robot. Implementations of different gaze mechanisms often include plausible human gaze timings and are evaluated in isolated single-task settings. However, humanoid social robots will be deployed in complex social situations. During a conversation a robot therefore might need to avert its gaze away from the human to demonstrate awareness of other events. Human-based gaze timings could be too restrictive to accomplish this task. Participants' levels of comfort, received attention, and behavioral engagement will be measured during a systematic variation on the gaze focus ratio in a conversation. The robot will alternatingly focus on the interviewer and objects at the back of the room. The findings will explore whether it is possible to design robot interactions that do not adhere to predetermined human-based parameters and compare interaction quality measures along the varied gaze focus split to actual HHI timing distributions.