Evaluations of Interactive Guideboard with Gaze-communicative Stuffed-toy Robot

In this paper, we introduce and evaluate an interactive guideboard with a communicative stuffed-toy guide-robot that behaves in correspondence to the user’s gazing direction. The proposed system adopts our remote gaze-tracking method, which estimates the user’s gaze angles based on image processing. The main purpose of this research is to provide intuitive and natural guidance interaction through an information board system that functions as if it were with a human guide who cares not only about the user’s active attitude but also about the user’s gaze. The system is applicable to both normal and disabled/unmotivated people who do not/cannot make an utterance but need some detailed information from the guideboard. It is also able to provide detailed information on any particular region of the guideboard corresponding to the subconscious interest of the user determined by her/his gazing direction. Our proposed interactive guideboard system combines the effective features of voice guidance following the user’s gaze, based on our remote gaze-tracking method, and the impact of anthropomorphism using various non-verbal expressions (Duffy, 2003, etc.), including gazing behaviors (Fukayama et al., 2002, etc.), while adopting a scheme of human-human communication (Kendon, 1967).