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Playing the Emotion Game with Feelix 73pression with vocal inflection and facial expression while commenting on theexpression (‘ooh, poor you!’, ‘look, now it’s happy!’). People thus seem to“empathize” with the robot quite naturally.4. What Features, What Interactions?What level of complexity must the emotional expressions of a robot have tobe better recognized and accepted by humans? The answer partly depends onthe kinds of interactions that the human-robot couple will have. The literature,mostly about analytic models of emotion, does not provide much guidance tothe designer of artifacts. Intuitively, one would think that artifacts inspired bya category approach have simpler designs, whereas those based on a componentialapproach permit richer expressions. For this purpose, however, morecomplex is not necessarily better, and some projects, such as [10] and Feelix,follow the idea put forward by Masahiro Mori (reported, e.g., in [9]) that theprogression from a non-realistic to a realistic representation of a living thing isnonlinear, reaching an “uncanny valley” when similarity becomes almost, butnot quite perfect 7 ; a caricaturized representation of a face can thus be moreacceptable and believable to humans than a realistic one, which can presentdistracting elements for emotion recognition and where subtle imperfectionscan be very disturbing. Interestingly, Breazeal’s robot Kismet [1], a testbedto investigate infant-caretaker interactions, and Feelix implement “opposite”models based on dimensions and categories, respectively, opening up the doorto an investigation of this issue from a synthetic perspective. For example, itwould be very interesting to investigate whether Feelix’s expressions wouldbe similarly understood if designed using a componential perspective, and tosingle out the meaning attributed to different expressive units and their rolesin the emotional expressions in which they appear. Conversely, one could askwhether Kismet’s emotional expression system could be simpler and based ondiscrete emotion categories, and still achieve the rich interactions it aims at.Let us now discuss some of our design choices in the light of the relevantdesign guidelines proposed by Breazeal in [2] for robots to achieve human-likeinteraction with humans.Issue I. The robot should have a cute face to trigger the ‘baby-scheme’ andmotivate people to interact with it. Although one can question the cutenessof Feelix, the robot does present some of the features that trigger the ‘babyscheme’8 , such as a big head, big round eyes, and short legs. However, noneof these features is used in Feelix to express or elicit emotions. Interestingly,many people found that Feelix’s big round (fixed) eyes were disturbing foremotion recognition, as they distracted attention from the relevant (moving)features. In fact, it was mostly Feelix’s expressive behavior that elicited thebaby-scheme reaction.