Julia Versteden , Researcher 

Social robots are designed to interact with humans in meaningful social ways. Because developers presumably aim to foster engagement and interaction with these robots, they should aim to design their appearance to be approachable, engaging, and enjoyable. A separate goal of many robot models is to also appear realistic or human-like as possible. To investigate how the facial appearance of robots might influence these important social perceptions, We manipulated the skin appearance of a highly detailed social robot face (Furhat Robotics) along two dimensions - skin color-heterogeneity and skin texture - and measured how the varied appearance influenced people’s (N = 37) evaluations of the robot’s trustworthiness, realism, and appearance preference. The results suggest that people generally prefer more color-homogenous and smoother skin-textural facial features on social robots. However there are some nuanced trade-offs between perceived trust, realism, and preference, depending on the type and extent of the manipulations we evaluated. This suggests there are important tradeoffs that need to be considered based on the design goals of robot developers. This work should help to inform important considerations when designing robots that are intended to interact with humans, and help facilitate more meaningful human-robot social interactions.

Bio

Julia Versteden is a Master’s student in Human-Technology Interaction at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. In her studies she mainly focused on lighting technologies. Her research interests are in how innovative technologies are perceived by humans. She successfully completed her Bachelor’s Psychology & Technology with research on the effect of color on motion perception. Her exchange at the Color Science department at RIT gave the opportunity to broaden her horizon. She is currently working on her thesis on brightness perception of different VR scenes at Signify N.V. in Eindhoven.

The Inter-Society Color Council advances the knowledge of color as it relates to art, science, industry and design.
Each of these fields enriches the others, furthering the general objective of color education.