A twinkling eyes interface that superimposes human shadows on attractive pupils

Abstract

Human affects and emotions are reflected in own eyes and metaphorized as impressions of the eyes such as “Eyes are smiling/not smiling.” Especially, when human has strongly interest or highly motivation, the metaphor is “The eyes are twinkling,” and others are fascinated and attracted to such twinkling eyes. Therefore, it is expected that it will lead to the investigation of factors that fascinate humans or the development of social robots and interfaces that attract humans by reproducing the twinkling eyes using an engineering approach. In this study, we proposed a twinkling eyes expression method that focuses on the reflection on the eyeball surface. This method simulates the specular reflection by superimposing a self-shadow on the pupil as a pseudo self-image. Furthermore, we developed a twinkling eyes interface by applying the proposed method to the pupil response system that has been developed. This interface can express the pupil response and the shade of self-shadow depending on the distance between the interface and the talker. The communication experiments were conducted under conditions with or without a self-shadow and with or without pupil dilation. The results demonstrated that the developed interface was effective, especially for male.

Keywords

• non-verbal communication
• human-robot interaction
• human interface
• affective expression
• attractive-ness
• glare