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Nonverbal communication

What I find to be very human is the way we can express ourselves without talking. Our nonverbal communication. We communicate nonverbally without even noticing. It happens naturally but plays a crucial role in our interactions. It signals whether someone is open to conversation or not and can reveal a person’s current state of mind.

NAVEL

Right now, we don’t see many communicative robots that actually use body language the way we do. Some robots, like the social robot NAVEL, incorporate body language, but this generally could be improved to feel more natural.

ELEGNT

Apple has started a research project where they built a communicative robot lamp called ELEGNT, which closely resembles the lamp from the Pixar movies. When asked about the weather, the lamp physically looks outside. If the weather is nice, it expresses a desire to go outside, but when it realizes it cannot, it shows disappointment by letting its head hang down. When told it can go outside later, it looks relieved. This very human-like body language makes interacting with the robot feel more natural.

The findings of this research project show that expression-driven movements significantly improve user engagement and the perceived qualities of robots, especially in socially oriented tasks. Beyond this, it demonstrated to me that even a robotic creature that looks nothing like a human can still enable natural-feeling communication through nonverbal responses.

Apple's ELGENT lamp

IDK-3000: My take on a non-human expressive creature

While most smart technology is designed to provide answers, IDK-3000 dares is different. It never knows anything. Ever. Equipped with voice recognition, this robotic piece of uncertainty listens intently to human questions, only to respond with an exaggerated display of confusion.

Instead of speech or facial expressions, IDK-3000 communicates purely through body language. This makes it a non-verbal, non-helpful, useless assistant. Ask it anything, and it might shrug dramatically, throw up its hands in exasperation, shake its head in defeat, raise its shoulders, or even spin in circles as if looking for an answer it will never find.

With a sleek, minimalist design and expressive gestures, IDK-3000 is the embodiment of robotic uncertainty. It is not here to solve problems. it just does not know… and that’s okay.

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