Now You See Me, Now You Don't is an investigation into the way we emotionally perceive the simple
gestures of machines.
I am RAY LC, assistant professor at the City University of Hong Kong.
In this project, I created machines and stories associated with them by manipulating the way
they gaze at our faces.
First up is the story of a shy lamp.
Notice from the video that the gestures and postures of the lamp leads us to wonder about
its personality.
Is it shy?
Is it scared?
These gestures abound also in other interactions, such as this chatbot that fails to reply,
leading us to think that it's flaky, or mysterious, or perhaps talking to someone else.
The qualitative results showed that people invented new ways of interacting with the
lamp, including hiding under the desk and swapping one face with another with a partner.
When we asked participants to rate the lamp, they appear to think the robot was very expressive,
however there's no significance difference in perceived expressiveness vs responsiveness.
This is the case of a single robot.
What happens when a flock of robots similar to the lamp is used to collectively gaze at
the participant?
We can put the camera either on the ground or on one of the agents, forming two types
of interactions.
In one case, the flock move collectively according to a model of the space.
In the other case, the participant has to grab the attention of the camera agent before
they can fix their gaze.
This array of robots can be used to tell stories that depend on whether the audience is looking
or not.
I used it to tell the story of the illicit love between Romeo and Juliet.
Thank you for your attention.
And also for the support from Parsons School of Design and City University of Hong Kong.