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YOTARO is a baby-type robot developed to create a new communication perspective between robots and humans through interaction experience based on the reproduction of a baby's behaviors and user actions. YOTARO exhibits different emotions and reactions, such as smiling, crying, sleeping, sneezing, and expressing anger. It is controlled by an emotion control program that executes in response to inputs such as touching its soft and warm face, touching its stomach, and shaking a rattle. The output is in the form of interactive reactions such as emission of sounds, change of expressions, limb movements, sniveling, and variation in skin color. In addition, we used questionnaires to observe the impression on users before and after their experience with YOTARO.

: This study verified how timing of sound effects affects the user's operation performance with interactive content, such as computer games. We conducted an experiment to test the hypotheses that (1) operation performance is slightly degraded if the sound effects lag behind the visual beat with "good" timing and (2) operation performance is substantially degraded if the sound effects lag behind the visual beat with "bad" timing, where the "visual beat" in interactive content is the repetition of periodic visual accents in visual images. Our findings indicate that a delayed timing of sound effects degrades the operation performance, but the degradation depends not only on the degree of delay of the sound effects, but also on how in tune the sound effects are with the visual beat.