The Effect of Prior Interaction Experience with Real/Virtual Robot on Participants' Leaving Message Task

This paper describes a simple psychological experiment to investigate the effects of two aspects of user interactions with message taking artifacts. The first is the effect of the artifacts' physical appearance, and the other is prior interaction experience. We examined the effect of these two factors on the ability of users to feel comfortable and natural when interacting with the artifacts. Experimental results revealed that prior interaction experience was a much more important factor than the artifacts' appearance in determining whether participants could leave verbal messages smoothly

I. Introduction

Recently various researchers have been working on achieving intimate relationships between humans and artifacts (e.g., partner robots, life-like agents or game characters) in various research fields, such as human-computer interaction (HCI) and Entertainment Computing (EC). In these situations, if users are uncomfortable interacting with an artifact and feel the interactions are unnatural they definitely cannot achieve an intimate relationship with it. Therefore, one can say that in the studies mentioned above have a common issue, and that is how to make users feel comfortable during these interactions, and to make them feel such interactions are natural.