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174 Socially Intelligent Agentsaction. Rather, we have built a teleoperated device, and manifested a degree ofsocial intelligence which we believe could be accomplished autonomously inthe near, though not present, future.Our studies were a broad ranging exploration that asked open-ended questions.Would people find Sparky compelling or disturbing? What behaviorswould people exhibit around the robot? What new skills does a robot need todevelop when it is in a social setting (and what skills can it forget)? We hopethat our findings can help to guide the development of future robots that eithermust or would like to be social with humans. We also hope that our workpoints to the potential for interface devices that use a physical system (a body)as a way to communicate with users.2. Prior WorkIn searching for inspiration in creating life-like characters, we first lookedtowards the principles of traditional animation and cartooning [13, 5]. Thecomputer graphics community has also explored many ways of creating realistic,screen-based, animated characters [1, 11]. We ended up using Ken Perlin’sImprov system [7] as the foundation for our approach to movement.Masahiro Mori has written eloquently on the perils of building a robot thatresembles a living creature too much. His point, that cartoons or simplified representationsof characters are generally more acceptable to people than complicated“realistic” representations, became an important tool in making ourdesign decisions (adapted from [9]).The emerging field of affective computing also provided motivation and justificationfor our work [8]. In an example of this type of endeavor, Breazeal[3, 2] has built an animated head, called Kismet, that can sense human affectthrough vision and sound and express itself with emotional posturing. Darwin’stimeless work [4] inspired us to use a face on our robot.Lastly, Isbister [6] has written an excellent discussion on the difference betweentraditional notions of intelligence, which emphasize the constructionof an accurate “brain”, and the idea of perceived intelligence, which emphasizesthe perceptions of those who experience these artificial brains. This workhelped us to understand how users saw intelligence in unfamiliar people ordevices.3. Our Robot, SparkySparky is about 60cm long, 50cm high and 35cm wide (Figure 21.1). It hasan expressive face, a movable head on a long neck, a set of moving plates on itsback and wheels for translating around the room. A remote operator manifeststhe personality we have constructed for Sparky in a manner similar to givingdirections to an actor on a stage: some movements are set explicitly and then