Evaluating Transferable Emotion Expressions for Zoomorphic Social Robots using VR Prototyping
Shaun Macdonald, Robin Bretin, Salma ElSayed

TL;DR
This paper explores how virtual reality prototyping can be used to evaluate and improve emotional expressions in zoomorphic robots, enhancing their ability to foster affective relationships.
Contribution
It introduces a VR-based rapid prototyping approach for assessing multimodal emotion expressions in zoomorphic robots, overcoming physical constraints of hardware testing.
Findings
Facial expressions are highly recognizable and effective.
Combining animal-like and unambiguous modalities enhances user empathy.
VR prototyping makes design evaluation more accessible.
Abstract
Zoomorphic robots have the potential to offer companionship and well-being as accessible, low-maintenance alternatives to pet ownership. Many such robots, however, feature limited emotional expression, restricting their potential for rich affective relationships with everyday domestic users. Additionally, exploring this design space using hardware prototyping is obstructed by physical and logistical constraints. We leveraged virtual reality rapid prototyping with passive haptic interaction to conduct a broad mixed-methods evaluation of emotion expression modalities and participatory prototyping of multimodal expressions. We found differences in recognisability, effectiveness and user empathy between modalities while highlighting the importance of facial expressions and the benefits of combining animal-like and unambiguous modalities. We use our findings to inform promising directions…
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Taxonomy
TopicsVirtual Reality Applications and Impacts · Social Robot Interaction and HRI
