Sean Andrist, a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (who knows what he’s doing), has been researching social gaze with robots. He’s developed algorithms that help robots look at people at the right times and in the right ways. It’s not just making the robots less creepy, but more helpful as well.
Extroverts (you know who you are) tend to get along better with other extroverts. Introverts (you know who you are, too) tend to get along better with either other introverts, or nobody (for introverts this is often the preference). This goes farther than just who you feel comfortable hanging out with: it’s also who you’re most effective around, in terms of things like productivity and problem solving. One of the most reliable ways to tell what kind of “vert” someone is (besides whether or not they come to your parties, and if they do, whether or not they hide in a closet) is their gaze: extroverts tend to look at the people they’re talking to significantly more than introverts do. You may have noticed this “mutual gaze,” unless you’re an introvert, in which case you were probably looking somewhere else.
If you’re a humanoid robot, you can use these data to help you interact more effectively with humans.
via IEEE Spectrum
Image: Sean Andrist/University of Wisconsin?Madison
