How do we design social agents and characters?
Understanding how characters and social agents such as software agents and lifelike robots help to evoke social responses or even lifelike attributions is an important part of my research. The results of this work have important implications for HRI, and also for screen-based computer interaction, particularly with humanlike software agents. Specific projects include: A study to understand what features make a humanoid robot head seem more humanlike. We derived five design recommendations for humanoid robot heads, and used this to design a robot head with 36 configurations that vary the height of the chin and forehead, color of the lips, perceived eye size, and perceived distance between the eyes. A series of studies to explore the relationship between the visual features of embodied agents and the tasks they perform, and the social attributions that result. Our results show that for both a set of 24 agents collected from various commercial products and research efforts, and a set of 24 agents that were carefully designed and controlled by my research group, a clear link between agent task and agent form exists. People also often prefer agents who conform to gender stereotypes associated with tasks. A study to understand whether an agent that looks like the self can present find their own face more credible as an agent, they tend not to follow its advice. In conditions where they created a face that looked like themselves, they rated the face as highly trustworthy, but they did not like the face very much.Related Publications
Forlizzi, J., Zimmerman, J., Mancuso, V., and Kwak, S. (2007). How Interface Agents Affect Interaction Between Humans and Computers. Proceedings of DPPI07. New York, NY: ACM Press, 209-221. [local pdf, 1.2 MB]
Li, I., Forlizzi, J., and Dey, A. (2007). My Agent as Myself or Another: Effects on Credibility and Listening to Advice. Proceedings of DPPI07. New York, NY: ACM Press, 194-208. [local pdf, 3.4 MB]
Zimmerman, J., Ayoob, E., Forlizzi, J., and McQuaid, M. (2005). Putting a Face on Embodied Interface Agents. Proceedings of DPPI05. Eindhoven, the Netherlands: Kluwer Press, 233-248. [local pdf, 632 KB]
DiSalvo, C., Gemperle, F., Forlizzi, J., and Kiesler, S. (2002). All Robots are Not Created Equal: The Design and Perception of Humanoid Robot Heads. Designing Interactive Systems 2002 Conference Proceedings, London, England, June, 2002, 321-326. [local pdf, 116 KB]
Copyright 2008 Jodi Forlizzi.