Fusing realities in human-robot social interaction

As robots become more and more embedded in our physical and social environment, their integration into our social interaction space necessitates mechanisms which manage these new social contexts. While considerable work has been invested in developing strong human-like robots in order to arguably augment the human-robot interaction experience, the core complexity and significant costs with such an approach render it difficult to justify for practical real-world applications. This paper discusses the use of augmented reality as a tool to bypass this issue and allow the designer, and subsequent user, to easily choose an aesthetic with associated social behavioural mechanisms. Not only does this allow a user to perceive an associated form with a robot, but also allows many people to perceive alternate forms for the same robot, a degree of social customisation which has been impossible until now.