Using Mixed Reality Agents as Social Interfaces for Robots

Abstract

Endowing robots with a social interface is often costly and difficult. Virtual characters on the other hand are comparatively cheap and well equipped but suffer from other difficulties, most notably their inability to interact with the physical world. This paper details our wearable solution to combining physical robots and virtual characters into a mixed reality agent (MiRA) through mixed reality visualisation. It describes a pilot study demonstrating our system, and showing how such a technique can offer a viable alternative cost effective approach to enabling a rich social interface for human-robot interaction.