After HRI’10 in Osaka I gave a talk at ATR’s Intelligent Robotics and Communication Labs, the place where Geminoid, Hiroshi Ishiguro’s doppelgänger robot lives. The visit was excellent and I really enjoyed my talk and the lab tour.
Meeting Geminoid after my talk was an interesting experience. I hadn’t expected it to affect me all that much, but the feeling I had during walking up to the robot was horribly similar to walking into an open casket wake; something felt off and it was a social situation I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with. Touching Geminoid felt strange, especially since you wouldn’t do the same to the real Hiroshi – in my mind he was around, watching.
As of November 2nd I’m a post-doc researcher at 
New paper! June 18th we’ll present our work on touch and human-robot interaction at CASA 2009 here in Amsterdam. The full paper will appear in a special issue of the Journal of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds. Our paper discusses an experiment on the effects of (observing) touch and proactivity on attitudes towards embodied social agents. Based on our results we think a holistic approach to interaction design for embodied characters’ social behaviour is the way to go. 
