Evaluation of Attention Inducing Effects Using Ubiquitous Humanlike Face Robots

A human gaze not only has the meaning that someone is looking at something, but also has various effects on the surrounding people. For example, previous studies have shown that attention is induced in the gaze direction of others and that consciousness of being seen by others affects human behavior. In the future, android robots will play an active role in society.We can predict that communication and information transmission with such gaze information will be possible between humans and robots. However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has yet investigated the effect of robot gazes on people in a situation where many robots exist ubiquitously in daily life. Therefore, in this study, we aim to evaluate the attention inducing effect of the gaze of the face robots installed in the daily living environment. In this paper, we present several examples of services in a situation, where face robots are established ubiquitously in daily life. We verified the attention inducing effect in three test cases. As a result of the experiment, the number of times when the participants focused their attention in the direction of the gaze of the face robot was small. However, the feasibility of the service was demonstrated through the results of the experiment, such as surrounding situation, user's consciousness about the face robots, and attention induction timing.