Infusing CuddleBits with Emotion: Build your Own and Tell Us About it

In designing social robot motion, displaying emotion is notoriously tricky. There has been some success with arousal, but valence (positivity) remains elusive. Viewing emotion as a longitudinal, context-informed experience rather than a discrete, segmented, and homogeneous event brings nuance to the task of display, with different challenges but also opportunities. We have observed impact of both structural characteristics (e.g., motion complexity) and narrative frame (developed over time) on a viewer's perception of a given motion's emotional content. Accompanying our CHI'18 paper, this demo offers exploration of both behaviour complexity and narrative frame through haptic emotion display, via the: (1) Behaviour playback station, attendees experience the influence of behaviour complexity on valence. (2) Robot customization station, attendees accessorize a base prototype as they mold its personality and story. (3) Tabletop stage, attendees record photos/videos to preserve the stories/behaviours devised for their custom creation.