Agents of Spatial Influence

Autonomous devices interact with us using explicit gestures. Robots, for example, affect our perception and behavior by using human-mimetic gestures to communicate recognition, disagreement, or understanding. However, these machines also implicitly affect human behavior in physical spaces by their presence and arrangement in space. Here we describe design of interactions consisting of explicit machine gestures and implicit behavioral effects in physical space, presenting participants with autonomous chair agents in still-image, video, and virtual environment media. We investigated implicit influence by using eye-tracking to study perceptual attention using different chair arrangements; and explicit chair gestures using videos of chair-human interactions. We then incorporated both spatial arrangement and gestures in a virtual platform to test audience experience.