With the advent of software agents and assistants, the concept of so called conversational user interfaces evolved, incorporating natural language interaction, dialogue management, and anthropomorphic representations. Today's challenge is to build a suitable visualization architecture for anthropomorphic conversational user interfaces, and to design believable and appropriate face-to-face inter...

Agents are semi-autonomous software entities that perform tasks on behalf of their users. One of the attributes an agent may possess is anthropomorphism the projection of human characteristics onto non-human or inanimate objects. As anthropomorphic agents become more common we need to consider what impact they will have on their human users. I put forward a for and against argument drawn from t...

For millennia, adults have told children stories not only to entertain but also to impart important moral lessons to promote prosocial behaviors. Many such stories contain anthropomorphized animals because it is believed that children learn from anthropomorphic stories as effectively, if not better than, from stories with human characters, and thus are more inclined to act according to the mora...

This paper describes a small cylindrical display for an anthropomorphic agent that communicates with users in a threedimentional (3D) environment. Conventional displays for anthropomorphic agents are designed for a single user or a fixed viewing direction. We suggest a new small cylindrical display that is visible from the outside in any direction. Image data for the projector is calculated by ...

This paper describes two preliminary experiments concerned with the construction of a robot head. The initial design and research is aimed at producing a system with two cameras and two microphones on a system capable of operating with the same degrees of freedom and reflex times as its biological counterpart. Whilst the primary goal of the project is develop an anthropomorphic system with the ...

Robotic hands differ in kinematics, dynamics, programming, control and sensing frameworks. Borrowing the terminology from software engineering, there is a need for middleware solutions to control the robotic hands independently from their specific structure, and focusing only on the task. Results in neuroscience concerning the synergistic organization of the human hand, are the theoretical foun...

This short paper outlines a framework for an evaluation method that takes as an input a model of an anthropomorphic artificial hand and produces as output the set of tasks that it can perform. The framework is based on the anatomy and functionalities of the human hand and methods of implementing these functionalities in artificial systems and focuses on the evaluation of the intrinsic hardware ...

Humanoid robots such as Asimo (Honda Motor Co., Ltd.) [1], Qrio (Sony Co.) [2] and Justin (German Aerospace Center DLR) [3] are just the precursor of the service and space robotic systems of the near future, when anthropomorphic kinematics will be more present in everyday life as well as in space robotic applications. Ergonomics provide a wide range of methods to describe, analyze and evaluate ...

We report on an experiment that examined the inuence of anthropomorphism and perceived agency on presence, copresence, and social presence in a virtual environment. The experiment varied the level of anthropomorphism of the image of interactants: high anthropomorphism, low anthropomorphism, or no image. Perceived agency was manipulated by telling the participants that the image was either an a...

Grasping objects with high dimensional controllers such as an anthropomorphic hand using reinforcement learning is a challenging problem. In this work we experiment with a 16-D simulated version of a prosthetic hand developed for SouthHampton Hand Assessment Procedure (SHAP). We demonstrate that it is possible to learn successful grasp policies for an anthropomorphic hand from scratch using dee...