Abstract
Different social robotics studies are carried out to give robotic gadgets an interactive retrofit. In this research, we tried to present a new perspective on using interactive animated toys in a virtual environment. Such social toys would be able to interact with children in the same way as social robots. To this end, a 3D scanner setup and interface was designed/fabricated and implemented to extract the 3D model of an inanimate toy to be used in a virtual reality game. The children were asked to participate in a fifteen-minute game scenario and play with the interactive virtual social toy. Then the Believability, Acceptance/Attractiveness, and Vibrancy/Interaction of the virtual social toy were assessed quantitatively through a questionnaire. Our preliminary findings showed high scores in all three criteria by the children. However, 2-sample T-tests indicated a significant difference between the children and parents’ viewpoints regarding the effectiveness of this generation of new toys.
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Acknowledgement
This research was funded by the “Cognitive Sciences and Technology Council (CSTC)” of Iran and “National Elites Foundation” of Iran. We also appreciate our lab members Mr. Behrad Mozaffari and Mr. Alireza Esfandbod for their cooperation.
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Taheri, A. et al. (2018). Virtual Social Toys: A Novel Concept to Bring Inanimate Dolls to Life. In: Ge, S., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11357. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05204-1_28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05204-1_28
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