FacePartBot: The Interactive Face Components

Mr. Potato Head is one of the popular toys for kids to provoke their creativity by allowing kids to combine various modules of face parts including eyes, noses, mouths, and so on. In our study, we developed an intelligent Mr. Potato Head kit, called FacePartBot which is composed of face components with various interactivity. According to Kwak et al.'s study about customers' acceptance of a robot based on new product category[1], people categorize the new product by its physical appearance and expect its function based on its appearance. When the expected functions from the appearance match with the actual functions, it increases customers' acceptance of the product. Thus, the expected function of the product-oriented robot would be well matched with the actual function of it as its appearance is similar to that of original form, called mother product, and its function is the augmented function of the mother product. On the other hand, the degree of match between the expected function and the actual function of the human-oriented robot would be lowered as its appearance resembles humans and its performance is out of reach to that of a real human. As a result, the product-oriented robot was categorized differently with the human-oriented robot and accepted more by customers than the human-oriented robot. We assumed that when the robot face is decomposed to each part, such as eye, nose, mouth, and so on, people would categorize the face robot and the face part robot differently. We expect that they would categorize the face robot to the human face by expecting cognitive processes of human brain while they would categorize the face part robot to the Mr. Potato Head kit without much expectation about the cognitive capabilities. As the design strategy of a face part robot, the decomposition of the face could lower the expectation of the robot performance, this could lead to the higher acceptance by the customers.