Embodied, visible, and courteous: exploring robotic social touch with virtual idols

Yuya Onishi; Kosuke Ogawa; Kazuaki Tanaka; Hideyuki Nakanishi

doi:10.3389/frobt.2024.1240408

Embodied, visible, and courteous: exploring robotic social touch with virtual idols

Front Robot AI. 2024 Mar 25:11:1240408. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2024.1240408. eCollection 2024.

Authors

Yuya Onishi¹, Kosuke Ogawa², Kazuaki Tanaka³, Hideyuki Nakanishi⁴

Affiliations

¹ Interaction Science Laboratories, Advanced Telecommunication Research Institute International, Sorakugun, Japan.
² Department of Mechanical Engineering, Osaka University, Suita, Japan.
³ Faculty of Information and Human Sciences, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Kyoto, Japan.
⁴ Faculty of Informatics, Kindai University, Higashi-osaka, Japan.

Abstract

In recent years, virtual idols have garnered considerable attention because they can perform activities similar to real idols. However, as they are fictitious idols with nonphysical presence, they cannot perform physical interactions such as handshake. Combining a robotic hand with a display showing virtual idols is the one of the methods to solve this problem. Nonetheless a physical handshake is possible, the form of handshake that can effectively induce the desirable behavior is unclear. In this study, we adopted a robotic hand as an interface and aimed to imitate the behavior of real idols. To test the effects of this behavior, we conducted step-wise experiments. The series of experiments revealed that the handshake by the robotic hand increased the feeling of intimacy toward the virtual idol, and it became more enjoyable to respond to a request from the virtual idol. In addition, viewing the virtual idols during the handshake increased the feeling of intimacy with the virtual idol. Moreover, the method of the hand-shake peculiar to idols, which tried to keep holding the user's hand after the conversation, increased the feeling of intimacy to the virtual idol.

Keywords: handshake; haptic devices; human-likeness; social touch; virtual idol; virtual interaction.

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP19H00605, 19K12081, JP20H01585, JP20K02982, JP20K20709, JP22K18548, JP22K12126, JP23K13305, and JST CREST Grant Number JPMJCR18A1.