A new study from the University of Auckland found that people are more comfortable interacting with a robot that looks human.
A new study from the University of Auckland found that people are more comfortable interacting with a robot that looks human.
For the study, 30 volunteers, ages 18 to 38 got their blood pressure taken by three different robotic interfaces, then the participants rated their experience with each one.
The results show that the robot with a human face was perceived as being friendly, helpful and patient.
The other robot was silver and mechanical looking, and participants responded by saying that it felt sterile and eerie.
The third display was just a voice with no visual representation, which participants said they trusted more than the mechanical looking robot.
Professor Bruce MacDonald from the university's department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, skeptical of the need for more human-looking robots,: “It will be more expensive to make a robot more and more human like and it's not clear that people actually want that, because there's some evidence to say that if you make it too human like people might find it freaky.”
Regardless, 60 percent of the participants in the study said they preferred to interact with the human like robot.
30 percent said they liked the display with no face, and 10 percent said they liked the mechanical face more than the others.
