Fast Company posted this story about MIT Media Lab grad student Alexander Reben’s project to design a simple robot that relies on cuteness to get people to interact with it and help it. The original plan, according to Reben, was to construct the finished robot out of white plastic, but people were turned off by the plastic and found a robot made out of cardboard boxes to be much cuter. Which, OMFG, I totally lost it when I watched the video and heard the robot manipulating..asking people for help.
Me, watching the video of Boxie
As a couple of the commenters in the FC story note, the idea is pretty much blatantly ripped off from a project by artist/designer Kacie Kinzer called Tweenbots. Kinzer made up some simple robots that she set loose in New York City to see if people would engage with them and help them, and she got some very interesting results not very unlike Reben’s. Be sure to watch the video on the Tweenbots site to compare to the Boxie video. Reben’s Boxie robot turns the kawaii dial up to 11 by relying on the oversized robot head and eyes and the childlike voice, but the resemblance to the Tweenbots is uncanny.
For contrast, consider this project from Martin Buss at the Technical University of Munich. Buss’s team constructed a much larger and more sophisticated robot complete with complex 3-D imaging and speech recognition. The robot’s mission was to get from Point A to Point B using only directions provided by random encounters with people on the street. It used an algorithm to analyze directions from spoken words and body gestures, but still relied on empathetic reactions from people to solicit interactions. And even though the robot wasn’t as cute as a frickin’ kitten, it still got people to help, and only got one set of wrong directions. Of course, it may have helped to be in Germany, where people are 1. dazzled by engineering and 2. more conformist about social rules like giving directions. A big ugly robot like that in New York probably would have been jacked for its tires and set on fire in a trash can in about three minutes.
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