Hold my ice cream - or maybe not

Do your remember those Turkish ice cream vendors that became famous for mocking their customers? Just as they seemed to leave the cone in the hands of guy on the spot, they moved it out of his reach. We have to admit that their behaviour is as annoying as deeply human.

We as humans have always loved pranking other people and laugh at their confusion. The Germans would call that Schadenfreude: the joy derived from another person's misfortune. But sometimes a trick is just a way to establish a connection, to ease the tension or even to flirt. We don't know why we love pranking. We just know we will never stop.

What if robots now treated us the same way we've been treating each other forever? It's what a team of Human-Computer Interaction researchers want to find out. In their new research project they've just examined how a robotic manipulator can reproduce playful, deceptive behaviour through the same trick of Turkish ice cream vendors. The results show that humans interacting with such a unique robot increase their engagement and enjoyment levels, but reduce their perceived safety and trust. If we are not used to a robot behaving in unpredictable and inexplicable ways, that's really what would make it more human.

Art deepened the relationship between pranks and robots too. In 2009 Ken Rinaldo presented Paparazzi Bots, a series of autonomous robots, comprised of multiple microprocessors, cameras, sensors, code, and robotic actuators, that move at the speed of a walking human and by surprise capture photos of unprepared visitors. They mock our obsession for our own image, with a non-human external approach that sparks our interest with its disruptive perspective.

From Kismet onwards, we've become accustomed to making eye contact with robots. Interactive sensors made us consider it normal to look into a robot's eyes and be followed by his gaze. What if an artificial creature didn't really want to look at us? What if an artificial creature deliberately avoided our eye contact, turning 180 degrees no matter what position we took?

iSiren is a robot designed, just like the sirens behaved with Ulysses, to lure its audience and leave them disappointed. At first, it attracts the visitors by turning its rotating speakers in their direction. The music playing seems to be irresistible. But as soon as participants try to approach the robot and see its front face, it suddenly rotates in the opposite direction, while the speakers start charming again the audience in an infernal, endless loop.