Service robots that coexist with humans in everyday life have become more common, and they have provided customer service in physical shops around the world in recent years. However, their potential in effective sales strategies has not been fully realized due to their low social presence. This study aims to clarify what kind of robot behavior enhances the social presence of service robots and how it affects human–robot interaction and purchasing behavior. We conducted two experiments with a sales robot, Pepper, at a retail shop in Kyoto. In Experiment 1, we showed that the robot’s social presence increased and that customers looked at the robot longer when the robot understood human gaze information and was capable of shared attention. In Experiment 2, we showed that the probability of customers picking up products increased when the robot suggested products based on the humans’ degree of attention from gaze and posture information. These results indicate that the robot’s ability to understand and make utterances about a customer’s orientation and attention effectively enhances human–robot communication and purchasing motivation.

Robotic salespeople are often ignored by people due to their weak social presence, and thus have difficulty facilitating sales autonomously. However, for robots that are remotely controlled by humans, there is a need for experienced and trained operators. In this paper, we suggest crowdsourcing to allow general users on the internet to operate a robot remotely and facilitate customers’ purchasing activities while flexibly responding to various situations through a user interface. To implement this system, we examined how our developed remote interface can improve a robot’s social presence while being controlled by a human operator, including first-time users. Therefore, we investigated the typical flow of a customer–robot interaction that was effective for sales promotion, and modeled it as a state transition with automatic functions by accessing the robot’s sensor information. Furthermore, we created a user interface based on the model and examined whether it was effective in a real environment. Finally, we conducted experiments to examine whether the user interface could be operated by an amateur user and enhance the robot’s social presence. The results revealed that our model was able to improve the robot’s social presence and facilitate customers’ purchasing activity even when the operator was a first-time user.

採録決定済み

採録決定済み

採択率46.2% Best Paper Award（26件中1位）

採択率44.4%

採択率42.9% インタラクティブ発表賞（一般投票）（67件中の3件が受賞）

There are several ways in which a conversation partner points to a remote place in videoconferencing: (1) displaying the partner’s pointing gesture, that is, ordinary videoconferencing, (2) displaying the partner’s arm on a tabletop display, (3) projecting a laser dot and it is synchronized with the laser pointer held by the partner, and (4) embodying the partner’s pointing behavior by a robotic pointer or a robotic arm. In this study, we implemented these methods on the videoconferencing system and compared the effect on social telepresence (i.e. the sense that a participant feels as if he/she meets with the conversation partner in the same place). We found that the fourth method, which embodied the remote partner’s pointing behavior, enhanced social telepresence.

There are several merits to embody the remote partner's body to the video conference: showing it physically, making a physical contact, and enhancing social telepresence. In this paper, we tackled to embody a part of a remote partner's body in a video conference. As a method to show how effectively the embodied body part works, we focused on face-to-face communication of the hand gestures such as thumb wrestling, finger number game and pointing. We developed a robotic arm, which seems the remote partner's arm popped out from the video. Our robot arm synchronizes with the remote partner's arm movements. We conducted experiments to verify the method of embodying a part of a remote partner's body. We found that, our method reduced the feeling of being far from the remote partner, and enhanced social telepresence, comparing video and physical embodiment.

採択率31.6%(ロング発表)

In this study, we developed a telepresence system which has a flexible and deformable screen. The screen deforms in synchronization with the move of the objects on the projected video. This deformation of the display surface provides the perception of depth for the projected video. We attempted to add the perception of depth to the video of the remote person and extend a video conferencing system. The results of the experiment suggested that the perception of depth provided by system strengthens the presence of a remote person and an object on the video.

Previous research has made various efforts to produce human-like presence of autonomous social robots. However, such efforts often require costly equipment and complicated mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a new method that makes a user feel as if an autonomous robot is controlled by a remote operator, with virtually no cost. The basic idea is to manipulate people's knowledge about a robot by using priming technique. Through a series of experiments, we discovered that subjects tended to deduce the presence/absence of a remote operator based on their prior experience with that same remote operator. When they interacted with an autonomous robot after interacting with a teleoperated robot (i.e., a remote operator) whose appearance was identical as the autonomous robot, they tended to feel that they were still talking with the remote operator. The physically embodied talking behavior reminded the subjects of the remote operator's presence that was felt at the prior experience. Their deductions of the presence/absence of a remote operator were actually based on their "beliefs" that they had been interacting with a remote operator. Even if they had interacted with an autonomous robot under the guise of a remote operator, they tended to believe that they were interacting with a remote operator even when they subsequently interacted with an autonomous robot.

Thanks to the maturity of motion tracking technologies, it became easy and inexpensive to use avatars that reflect the user's facial and body motions in real time. There is a possibility that those real-time avatars can serve as a substitute for videos in distant communication. We conducted two experiments to confirm positive effects of avatars on distant communication. In the first experiment, the subjects watched a conversation partner's video, avatar, photo, or nothing when speaking to the partner. Because the video and avatar delivered the partner's motion while the video and photo delivered the partner's appearance, we were able to observe the effects of the motion and appearance separately. As a result, we found that presenting the motion via a video or an avatar increased the degree of the smoothness of speaking to the partner, but the appearance did not significantly affect such an influence. In the second experiment, we compared the avatar and teleoperated robot to find how a physical embodiment influences the degree of the smoothness of speech. Teleoperated robots resemble avatars in transmitting the user's body motions without disclosing the user's appearance but differ in reflecting these motions onto a robot that has a physical embodiment. We predicted that the robot produces smoother speech because the physical embodiment might make the body motions recognizable. However, the robot decreased the degree of the smoothness of speech against our expectation. The results of these experiments showed that real-time avatars that present only body motions are enough to smooth distant communication. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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採択率50.0%

採択率50.0%

採択率41.6%

採択率11.3%(ロング発表)

In a videoconferencing system, there is a problem that the direction to which a remote instructor points is unclear. To solve this problem, we developed the PopArm, a remote pointing robotic arm that seems to pop out from the video. The PopArm is able to move and rotate on a display, synchronizing with the movement of the remote instructor's arm. This robot arm allows the remote instructor to three-dimensionally point at remote locations. In addition, it is expected that the PopArm enhances social telepresence, i.e., the sense of resembling face-to-face interaction, due to the design which the remote instructor's arm seems to pop out from video.

The main feature of robot conferencing is to present the body motions of a conversation partner with a physical embodiment. The purpose of this study is to clarify the effects of this feature on social telepresence, i.e., the sense of resembling face-to-face interaction. We conducted an experiment in which subjects talked with a remote conversation partner through various communication media to compare the robot conferencing with existing media that have no physical embodiment. As a result, we observed that the physical embodiment enhanced social telepresence.

Since past studies on haptic and visual communication have tended to be isolated from each other, it has remained unclear whether a touch channel can still enrich mediated communication where video and audio channels are already available. To clarify this, we analyzed remote handshaking in which a robot hand that was attached just under a videoconferencing terminal's display moved according to the opening and closing motion of a conversation partner's hand. Combining touch and video channels raises a question as to whether the partner's action of touching a haptic device should be visible to the user. If it can be invisible, the action may be unnecessary, and a unilaterally controlled device may be enough to establish an effective touch channel. Our analysis revealed that the feeling of being close to the partner can be enhanced by mutual touch in which the partner's action needs to occur but should be invisible.

採択率40.9%

Thanks to the maturity of motion tracking technologies, it became easy and inexpensive to use avatars that reflect the user's facial and body movements in real time. There is a possibility that those real-time avatars can serve as a substitute for videos in distant communication. We conducted an experiment to observe differences between video chat and voice chat, and examined whether avatar chat can produce the same differences. In the experiment the subjects watched a conversation partner's video, avatar, photo, or nothing when speaking to the partner. Since the video and avatar delivered the partner's motion while the video and photo delivered the partner's appearance, we were able to observe the effects of the motion and appearance separately. As a result, we found that presenting the motion via a video or an avatar increased the degree of the smoothness of speaking to the partner.

採択率41.9%

採択率38.5%

採択率26.4%

Media space is a promising but still immature technology to connect distributed sites. We developed a simple additional function that moved a remote camera forward when a local user approached a display so that the approach was amplified by a remote person's expanding image accompanied by motion parallax. We conducted an experiment in which, we observed that a movable camera enhanced social telepresence, which is the feeling of facing a remote person in the same room. Despite the camera's movement, subjects believed that the camera did not move and a zoom-in function expanded the image. Surprisingly, a zoom-in camera that expanded the image as the movable camera did, however, was ineffective probably because of a lack of motion parallax. Although we explained nothing about the camera, most subjects noticed that their walking caused the view's expansion. If a remote person initiated the camera's movement, social telepresence. could not be enhanced.

採択率35%

A lot of street view services, which present views of urban landscapes, have recently appeared. The conventional method for making street views requires on-vehicle cameras. We propose a new method, which relies on people who voluntarily take photos of an urban landscape. We have developed a system called QyoroView. The system receives photos from users, adjusts the photos' position and orientation, and finally synthesizes them to generate a street view. We conducted two experiments in which the subjects generated a street view using our system. We also observed and interviewed the subjects who participated in order to learn their impression of the system. © 2009, IGI Global.

Many research projects have studied various aspects of smart environments including smart rooms, home, and offices. Few projects, however, have studied smart urban public spaces such as smart railway stations and airports due to the lack of an experimental environment. We propose virtual cities as a testbed for examining the design of smart urban public spaces. We developed an intelligent emergency guidance system for subway stations and used the virtual subway station platform to analyze the effects of the system. This experience allows us to argue that simulations in virtual cities are useful to pre-test the design of smart urban public spaces and estimate the possible outcome of real-life scenarios. © 2009, IGI Global.

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To test large scale socially embedded systems, this paper proposes a multiagent-based participatory design that consists of two steps; 1) participatory simulation, where scenario-guided agents and human-controlled avatars coexist in a shared virtual space and jointly perform simulations, and the extension of the participatory simulation into the 2) augmented experiment, where an experiment is performed in real space by human subjects enhanced by a large scale multiagent simulation. The augmented experiment, proposed in this paper, consist of 1) various sensors to collect the real world activities of human subjects and project them into the virtual space, 2) multiagent simulations to simulate human activities in the virtual space, and 3) communication channels to inform simulation status to human subjects in the real space. To create agent and interaction models incrementally from the participatory design process, we propose the participatory design loop that uses deductive machine learning technologies. Indoor and outdoor augmented experiments have been actually conducted in the city of Kyoto. Both experiments were intended to test new disaster evacuation systems based on mobile phones.

Though research on agents that interact with humans via voice or text has been intensively conducted, agents that can interact with more than two persons in parallel have not been studied well. To enable an agent to interact with multiple people, we propose a method to assign multiple scenarios to one agent, in which each scenario describes an interaction protocol between the agent and one person. Obviously, coordination among multiple scenarios is required to avoid conflicts in actions. For example, one agent cannot execute both walking and sitting actions simultaneously. However, what is more important is that a coordination policy, a way of specifying how to manage conflicts among multiple actions, must be introduced. In this paper, we introduce a coordination scenario that avoids conflicts in actions and coordinates scenarios according to a coordination policy. The coordination scenario, which controls the execution of interaction scenarios by communication, is generated by a coordination policy for solving conflicts. When the coordination scenario receives a request to execute actions from an interaction scenario, it checks whether the actions will trigger conflicts and sends an order not to execute them if conflicts will occur. The coordination scenario interworks concurrent interaction scenarios by executing this process repeatedly.

Virtual training allows the learning and rehearsal of implicit cues, e. g., trustworthy leading action in an emergency evacuation, that cannot be easily understood through merely reading about situations, while mitigating the danger and expense of live rehearsals. We have focused our efforts on designing social agents that can engage in and help to train humans to generate the trustworthy behaviors that help to ensure a successful evacuation. Drawing upon social science research and using a "role-reversal method,'' we successfully constructed agents that can perceive trustworthiness as humans do. The agents first collect human responses to their own nonverbal cues in controlled experimental training scenarios. Using these results, we obtain optimal parameters for nonverbal cues of trustworthiness, and then can use them to guide agents who evaluate human performance in the same training scenarios. The method enables us to convert social psychological findings into computational mechanisms.

Future computing systems interact with a large number of users moving around buildings and streets. In this paper, we propose an example of such systems and how to evaluate ubicomp systems equipped with a large-scale physical environment that includes a large number of people inside. In our emergency guidance system, off-site guiding staff monitors a crowded large-scale public space to understand its situation, and instruct on-site guiding staff how to guide crowds effectively. Our system tracks and synthesizes the public space to enable the off-site staff to grasp it, and support communication between the on-site and the off-site staffs. Because it is not affordable to use the physical public space and a lot of human subjects to evaluate the system, we used our social interaction platform to simulate our guidance system. We could successfully construct simulations, in which the crowds are replaced with social agents in the virtual public space.

In this paper, we present the evacuation simulation system that is the combination of a virtual city and a crisis management simulation. The system allows users to become virtual evacuees in an evacuation simulation to learn about crowd behavior. In the experimental use of the system, we found that the synergic effects between a bird's-eye and a first-person views in learning emergency escaping behaviors. Based on this result, we designed a novel communication system that allows a remote leader to guide escaping crowds in an emergency situation. We deployed our prototype in the Kyoto Station.

採択率27%

採択率16%

FreeWalk is a social interaction platform where people and agents can socially and spatially interact with one another. FreeWalk has evolved to support heterogeneous interaction styles including meetings, cross-cultural encounters, and evacuation drills. Each of them is usually supported by an individual virtual environment. This evolution extended the capability to control social interaction. The first prototype only provides people with an environment in which they can gather to talk with one another while the third prototype provides them with a whole situation to behave according to their assigned roles and tasks. FreeWalk1 is a spatial videoconferencing system. In this system, the positions of participants make spontaneous simultaneous conversations possible. Spatial movements are integrated with video-mediated communication. FreeWalk1 is able to make social interaction more casual and relaxed than telephone-like telecommunication media. In contrast to conventional videoconferencing systems, people formed concurrent multiple groups to greet and chat with others. In FreeWalk2, a social agent acts as an in-between of people to reduce the problem of the low social context in virtual spaces. When the agent notes an awkward pause in a conversation, it approaches those involved in the conversation with a suggestion for a new topic to talk about. We used this agent to support cross-cultural communication between Japan and US. Our agent strongly influenced people's impressions of their partners, and also, their stereotypes about their partner's nationality. FreeWalk3 is a virtual city simulator to conduct virtual evacuation drills. This system brings social interaction into crisis management simulation. People can join a virtual scene of a disaster at home. Social agents can also join to play their roles assigned by simulation designers. The system architecture has a split control interface to divide control of multiple agents into high-level instruction for them and simulation of their low-level actions. The interface helps simulation designers to control many agents efficiently. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Communityware is for more diverse and amorphous groups of people. Compared to current groupware studies, communityware focuses on an earlier stage of collaboration: group formation from a wide variety of people. We have been working on real scale experiments on communityware for more than 8 years. This paper summarizes our experiences on real scale experiments on communityware: the Mobile Assistant Project, Digital City Kyoto, and the Intercultural Collaboration Experiment.

採択率26% Runner-up of Best Paper Award

推薦論文

As opportunities for international collaboration and crosscultural communication among people from heterogeneous cultures increase, the importance of electronic communication support is increasing. To support cross-cultural communication, we believe it is necessary to offer environments in which participants enjoy conversations, which allow them to share one another's background and profile visually. We believe that the following three functions are important: (1) showing topics based on participants' profiles and cultural background; (2) lifesized, large-screen interface; and, (3) displaying objects which show feelings of identify. In this paper, we discuss the implementation and the empirical evaluation of two systems that were designed to support cross-cultural communication in the real world or between remote locations. From the empirical evaluation of these systems, we conclude that these systems add new functionality to support conversation contents, which may be especially useful in a cross-cultural context where language skills are an issue, and this type of environment may be especially useful in a pre-collaboration context.

研究奨励賞（14件中1位）

This article introduces a collaborative project between NTT's Open Lab, Kyoto University's Department of Social Informatics and Stanford University's Communications Department. We created an agent prototype that was designed to support human-human communication in virtual environments. The prototype mimics a party host, trying to find a safe common topic for guests whose conversation has lagged. We performed an experimental evaluation of the prototype's ability to assist in cross-cultural conversations, using the Global Enhanced Multifunctional Network (GEMnet) broadband line between Stanford University, Kyoto University and NPT's Open Lab. In this overview, we will discuss the design of the prototype, as well as the evaluation.

This paper proposes the concept of digital cities as a social information infrastructure for urban life (including shopping, business, transportation, education, welfare and so on). We propose the three layer architecture for digital cities: a) the information layer integrates both WWW archives and real-time sensory information related to the city, b) the interface layer provides 2D and 3D views of the city, and c) the interaction layer assists social interaction among people who are living/visiting in/at the city. We started a three year project to develop a digital city for Kyoto, the old capital and cultural center of Japan, based on the newest technologies including GIS, 3D, animation, agents and mobile computing. This paper introduces the system architecture and the current status of Digital City Kyoto.

We have developed a desktop meeting environment named FreeWalk that supports casual meetings in a 3-dimensional (3D) virtual shared space, community common. Tools for human communicadons are always required to run at a practical speed in a widely-used non-luxury hardware environment. However, in the previous researches on 3D conferencing systems, such as VRML-based systems, this aspect has been sometimes neglected. Though we need a research testbed for investigating human-human interactions, researchers tend to concentrate on advanced 3D technologies. In the area of videogames, on the other hand, where 3D virtual spaces are also provided, technologies used there successfully achieve an attractive presentation under severe hardware constraints. Therefore, in the development of FreeWalk. we have applied videogame technologies especially to friendly interface and efficient visualization, so to realize casual communications in a network.

採択率22%

https://www.ipa.go.jp/archive/files/000006630.pdf

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