Comparison of Social Presence in Robots and Animated Characters

As interactive robots become an increasingly expressive medium that we can use in applications as varied as entertainment or education, insight into details of human-robot interaction becomes more necessary. This study uses a social presence scale to show how robots compare to humans and animated characters during interactions with subjects and discusses the implications of these findings. The study involved naïve subjects (n=32) interacting with a robot, an animated character, and a person in simple tasks. Subjects were asked to complete a questionnaire after their interactions. We show that the robot consistently scores higher on measures of social presence and engagement than the animated character. We describe the study and discuss implications of the findings to future work in building interactive robots and animated characters.