Explorations in engagement for humans and robots

Abstract

This paper explores the concept of engagement, the process by which individuals in an interaction start, maintain and end their perceived connection to one another. The paper reports on one aspect of engagement among human interactors-the effect of tracking faces during an interaction. It also describes the architecture of a robot that can participate in conversational, collaborative interactions with engagement gestures. Finally, the paper reports on findings of experiments with human participants who interacted with a robot when it either performed or did not perform engagement gestures. Results of the human-robot studies indicate that people become engaged with robots: they direct their attention to the robot more often in interactions where engagement gestures are present, and they find interactions more appropriate when engagement gestures are present than when they are not.

A Game-Based Corpus for Analysing the Interplay between Game Context and Player Experience

“…Furthermore, a person sitting in front of a computer monitor, at the start of an interaction should be expected to be "excused" if he or she is looking around. As the authors in [21] state, this is not necessarily a sign of indifference, but could declare a high degree of engagement, as it can be translated into the person's curiosity to familiarize himself with the environment. Following these ideas, the presented dataset and the accompanying information aim at correlating what is actually taking place in the game with people's reactions and their perception of game quality.…”

“…Smith et al [22] propose a scheme for mapping gaze and eye blinks to driver state, in the context of driving conditions, utilizing Finite State Automata. Sidner et al in [21] investigate those head movements that imply high degree of engagement with a robot utilizing head nods, gaze patterns, as well as head gestures declaring user familiarization with the environment.…”

Cooperative gestures: Effective signaling for humanoid robots

“…To date much work has been done on building robots capable of recognizing human gestural cues [3]- [5]; however, an equally important area to successful human-robot collaboration is making robots capable of generating meaningful, recognizable gestural cues to humans. Mutlu et.…”

The impact of head movements on user involvement in mediated interaction

“…In this study we proposed to focus on measuring engagement within conversational behaviours as they provide significant evidence of connection between the participants as supported by different studies Sidner, Lee, Kidd, Lesh, &Rich, 2005 andCassell, 2000.…”