the giggle virus

Dailenn's choice of something as common as laughter as a defining feature of creatureness is something that tickled my brain.

the DNA of each laugh

Simply put, we associate laughter with a communication of joy - although this is a universal human trait, there's no universal way of laughing. When exploring how different cultures express laughter in written form, her blog made me question whether the way we laugh is unique to us. By having lived surrounded by people, we already know that different people have different laughs, but quite little research has been done on this acoustical diversity. However, a study shows that laughs differ in duration, pitch, intensity, and structure [1], which is a solid argument for why laughing could be an individual's signature., a vocal fingerprint if you will.

laughter.exe

So, what if robots laughed as well? Using the android robot ERICA, scientists tested the effects of reactive machine laughter on human-robot interaction and found that the simple act of timed and contextually appropriate laughing can significantly increase people's empathy towards it [2].

could machines catch the giggles?

Another point made in the blog that I think is very fun to explore in the field of artificial creatures is the idea that laughing is contagious - how many times did you laugh because others did and you simply could not help but do so as well? This led to the idea of taking the research of Inoue et al. one step further: instead of making a robot laugh conversationally we could create a system of tiny artificial creatures that would gradually catch the "giggle virus".

These could be as simple as cubes with LED-based facial expressions - the one closest to the user starts laughing first and from there, a chain reaction sparks. To give these creatures a bit of their own personality and make the interaction more natural, the uniqueness of laughter explored above comes into play - each cube will have a different type of laugh assigned to it. The main focus of this installation is understanding social cognition, in part by mimicking a similar interaction to that of speaking to dolls as a child - would the dynamic of group laughter cause people to laugh even more, or does it impact their perception of the creatures in any way? That remains to be answered.

References

[1] Bachorowski, J., Smoski, M. J., & Owren, M. J. (2001). The acoustic features of human laughter. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 110(3), 1581–1597. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1391244

[2] Inoue, K., Lala, D., & Kawahara, T. (2022). Can a robot laugh with you?: Shared laughter generation for empathetic spoken dialogue. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2022.933261

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