Fumihide Tanaka, Javier R. Movellan, Bret Fortenberry and Kazuki Aisaka Daily HRI Evaluation at a Classroom Environment – Reports from Dance Interaction Experiments Proceedings of the 1st Annual Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2006), p.3-9Salt Lake City, U.S.A., March 2006

An interesting paper that reports on a study about human-robot interactions:

In this paper we present preliminary results on a study designed to evaluate an algorithm for social robots in relatively uncontrolled, daily life conditions. (...) The goal of the pro ject is to explore the use of interactive robot technologies in educational environments. To this effects two robot platforms, RUBI and QRIO, are being tested on a daily bases for prolonged periods of time. (...) One of QRIO’s most striking skills involves motion generation such as dancing. QRIO is endowed with various choreographed dance sequences, and is also capable of mimicking the motion of its human partner in real-time

What is interesting to me is how the authors experimented "different methods for evaluating and leaning about the interaction developed between the children and QRIO". The paper reports this evaluation of the daily dance inetraction using qualitative methodologies (coding interactions) and quantitative techniques (counting diverse indexes).

Why do I blog this? since pervasive computing, tangible interfaces, everyware, blogject and all this crowd is going to converge, this kind of research is more and more interesting to me, both from the methodological and the design point of view. Issues like artifacts affordance and attributions might then converge.