Evaluating Transferable Emotion Expressions for Zoomorphic Social Robots using VR Prototyping

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 for the affective zoomorphic robot design and potential implementations via hardware modification or augmented reality, then discuss how VR prototyping makes this field more accessible to designers and researchers.