On the Importance of Posture and the Interaction Environment: Exploring Agency, Animacy and Presence in the Lab vs Wild Using Mixed-Methods

This work explores three concepts relevant to the study of human-robot interaction: posture, setting and evaluation methods. The first concept is the importance of a robot's posture on its perceived interaction affordances. Early findings suggest that the same robot presented in different postural arrangements may significantly impact the way the interaction is perceived. Second, there is growing evidence to suggest the importance of situating interaction studies in-the-wild. We observed that the environment an interaction is situated in strongly affects the outcome, an indication that experiments constrained to the laboratory may not reveal useful social aspects relevant to understanding HRI fully. Finally, in order to conduct in-the-wild studies, we argue that current practice of using single-strand methods may not be sufficient; we instead explore a mixed-methods approach to study the complex social and environmental interplay between the robot, the participant and the bystanders.